


All That's Left To Hold Onto

by AdAbolendam



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Exposition, F/M, Family, Gen, Hope, Protective Skye | Daisy Johnson, SPOILERS FOR ENDGAME!!!, Secrets, Twists!, season 6 era, smatterings of fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2020-02-07 06:27:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 29,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18615001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdAbolendam/pseuds/AdAbolendam
Summary: “Five days was enough time to convince you to stop doing what you’ve done for the last twenty years?”May’s probing stare made her feel like she was being evaluated and was somehow coming up short. There was a charge between them like the tension between lightning and a thunderclap.“It wasn’t five days, Daisy,” May said at last. “It was five years.”--After seeing Sarge for the first time, Daisy and May have very different reactions. But there is a lot that Daisy does not understand, and May is not ready to give up all of her secrets.--**SPOILERS FOR AVENGERS: ENDGAME**





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> In this "version" of Season Six, Daisy stays behind on Earth.

Half of her wanted to forget what she had seen. Nothing about the last few hours made any sense. It would not have been hard to convince herself that the whole thing was a concussion-induced delusion.  
  
The other half wished she had never come back to SHIELD.  
  
If she was alone, she could track him down and deal with the situation without any of her teammates being the wiser. There would be difficult choices up ahead and they had all been through enough. If she could make the hard call without anyone else knowing, so much the better.  
  
But the damage was done.  
  
Melinda May had come back and the video footage from her body cam left no room for denial. She had not imagined it. A man that wore Phil Coulson’s face had driven a semi-truck through a shoot-out, gunned down a SHIELD agent, and walked away without a trace of recognition for his former teammates.  
  
Daisy and Yo-Yo stood in stunned silence as Mack rewound the footage and pressed “play” for the third time.  
  
_“Never heard of it.”_  
  
Mack closed his eyes when the shot rang out and the agent’s body hit the asphalt.  
  
As much as she did not want to be the one to break the silence, May knew that if she did not, they would stand there watching that horrible tableau all afternoon.  
  
“It’s not him.”  
  
Three pairs of eyes dragged themselves from the projection to look at her.  
  
Mack lowered his head and clicked a button on the remote that darkened the screen.  
  
“We’ve run the specs through facial recognition,” he muttered. “Three times. It’s a match.”  
  
A jolt of electricity burned through her gut and set her head spinning, but she did not waver.  
  
“That _man_ is not Phil Coulson.”  
  
She ignored the veiled look of concern that passed between Mack and Yo-Yo and ploughed on.  
  
“Coulson is dead,” she said. “I was there. Right up to the end.”  
  
“We believe you,” Daisy piped up. “I know this is hard. For everyone. And if it was anyone else, I’d agree. But this is Coulson we are talking about. He’s come back before. Is it that crazy to think that he could have come back again?”  
  
“You saw the footage,” May said. “You really think that that is Coulson? He shot one of our own. He didn’t…”  
  
She trailed off.  
  
That stare. It haunted her more than anything that was captured by her body camera. He had looked right through her, then walked off without breaking a stride. The man with Phil’s eyes did not know who she was.  
  
“Okay,” Yo-Yo broke in. “So this is what, an LMD?”  
  
Mack slumped into his desk chair.  
  
“That tech was destroyed,” he said. “Even Hydra couldn’t make it work right.”  
  
“Maybe they sold the specs to someone else?”  
  
“Guys,” Daisy said. “What if it is Coulson? His body, I mean. What if someone else got their hands on the formula from the Guest House? They could have brought him back, wiped his memories, and reprogrammed him?”  
  
“No!”  
  
Daisy jerked in surprise and May told herself to take a deep breath to keep from yelling.  
  
“It’s not him,” she continued quietly. “He’s gone. Whoever this person is, it’s a trick to distract us. It’s a threat to be eliminated. We see him in the field again, we take him out.”  
  
She turned on her heel and left the room before she could be dragged down by the weight of the stunned silence that followed her declaration.  
  


***

  
May had almost made it to the hanger by the time that Daisy caught up to her. She knew by now that her determined gait and taciturn demeanor was not the deterrent to her former protégé that it was for everyone else, but she did not slow her pace.

“Hey,” Daisy said, jogging up to her. “You want to tell me what’s going on with you?”

May decided not insult her by acknowledging the absurdity of the question.

Daisy rushed ahead and stood in front of her, blocking her path to the hanger bay.

“Look,” she said. “I get that it must have been messed up, seeing that after all that you’ve been through. But if there’s even a chance it’s him—May, I would think that of all people, you’d be on my side here.”

Poor kid.

For all of her abilities, wisdom, and emotional intelligence, she was still so young. She did not know why she had expected anything different. Only so much could change in a year.

“It’s not about ‘sides,’ Daisy,” she said gently. “It’s just not possible. It’s not Coulson.”

“Why not?” She insisted.

“Because he made me promise…”

May took a breath and started over.

“No one could have gotten to him,” she said. “There’s only one person who knows where he is buried. And I sure as hell didn’t tell anyone.”

Daisy’s wide eyes and downturned lips reminded May why they had never assigned her to undercover work. Her poker face was worse than Phil’s. At least she knew she had her attention.

“Was he—did he think that something like this could happen?” She asked.

“We’ve both seen enough to know that it’s not impossible,” May replied. “He didn’t want to come back, Daisy. He trusted me to make sure that he never did.”

She felt a twinge of sympathy as the girl’s shoulders slumped, all of her excited energy evaporating.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t know.”

May nodded and squeezed her shoulder, using the gesture of comfort to edge past her and slide her key card through the hanger door lock.

“May?” Daisy asked, turning around. “I’m sorry to ask, but are you sure? Are you sure that no one else saw where you buried him?”

The door slid open and May walked through it.

“No,” she said, without turning back.

“Where are you going?”

“To make sure he’s where I left him.”


	2. Chapter 2

Daisy slapped at a mosquito that landed near her ear and retied her hair into a messy ponytail. Even with the sweaty tangle of hair out of the way, there was little reprieve from the stifling heat that had yet to abate in the humidity of dusk. She swallowed her discomfort and lowered her shovel to the ground.

They were about five feet deep now, by her estimation. It would not be much longer.

“I get that you wanted to bury him somewhere where no one would find him,” she muttered. “But why here? It’s hotter than hell. You can’t breathe without inhaling a mouthful of mosquitoes.”

Maybe it was nicer here when it was not the middle of summer. With enough imagination, Daisy could see the pastures surrounding the farmhouse in Iowa as borderline picturesque. What she could not fathom was why Coulson would want to be buried or why May thought it was a good idea.

“You didn’t have to come,” May replied, continuing to dig at a furious pace.

Daisy gritted her teeth and flung a shovelful of dirt over her shoulder.

Maybe she did not have to come, but May should not have had to do this alone. No one should.

She rammed her shovel into the ground and froze, hearing a hollow thunk.

May stopped digging and stood up radiating carefully controlled calm.

“I can take it from here,” she said.

“May—

A look from her swallowed up Daisy’s protests.

“He wouldn’t want you to see him like this,” she explained quietly.

It was not until Daisy had scrambled out of the grave and was standing some ten yards away that she came to herself again. Tears of shame leaked from the corners of her eyes, but she could not make herself turn around.

Coulson’s death had been an abstract for her.

He and May had engineered it that way. His living wake was disguised as a retirement party. His last days were a “vacation.” Everyone knew what was happening, but there was no ring of finality when the team dropped him off in Tahiti.

The news came in the kindest way it could have, with a call from May announcing “he’s gone.”

Daisy did not have to watch as he struggled for those last gasps of air or have to fumble for the right words that would give him comfort. She did not have to see his lifeless body or deal with funeral arrangements (such as they were.) May had done all of it. She had carried all of their grief so that they would not have to.

Now that she had the opportunity to help her shoulder the pain, she could not do it. As much as she clinched her fists and told herself to get it together, all Daisy could do was stand with her back to Coulson’s grave and cry.

A wail broke through her veil of self-hatred and froze her blood.

Daisy’s mind went blank with panic at the sound that came from the grave. She caught herself mid-collapse and stumbled back towards May.

How could she have left her alone?

The hard smack of flesh hitting wood reached her ears, followed by another wail.

“M—May?”

Daisy peered into the hole at her feet and covered her mouth with her hands.

Six feet below her, caked in dirt and sweat, May knelt in an empty pine box. She had torn off the lid of the casket and was punching the wooden planks to splinters. Each contact was punctuated with a howl of despair.

Daisy jumped down into the grave behind her. Not knowing what to say, she reached out and put her hand on her friend’s shoulder.

May slackened like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

Minutes ticked by and Daisy stood immobile, not daring to remove her hand or move in closer for fear that she would make the situation worse.

“They took him,” May croaked at last.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

May turned to her, as if seeing her for the first time since they had landed. She nodded, then dug her hands into the sod on the side of the hole and pulled herself out. Daisy took the hand that she offered to her and allowed herself to be pulled to her knees beside the grave. May sat next to her and stared into the empty hole in silence.

The last vestiges of twilight were fading and Daisy could barely see the tattered box six feet below her in the gloom.

“May?” She started carefully. “I know it may not seem like it now, but I don’t think this is a bad thing. We know that the person that you saw was Coulson. Something terrible has happened to him. He’s been… brainwashed, or something. But, we can save him! May, we can bring Coulson back!”

Her mentor turned from the grave and stared at her blindly.

“This changes nothing.”

She got to her feet, leaving a gawking Daisy to scramble after her.

“What are you talking about?” She demanded. “This changes _everything!”_

Daisy nearly crashed into May as she stopped and whirled to face her.

“That man was not Coulson,” she growled.

“What—

“It may have been his body, but the part of him who made him the man we knew is gone, Daisy,” she said. “You need to accept that.”

She had no idea what had happened to May in her absence. She could only imagine what kind of grief she was dealing with. That sliver of sympathy was the only thing that was keeping Daisy from knocking her on her ass with a quake blast and shaking her until she came to her senses. And that sympathy was rapidly diminishing.

“So, what?” She asked. “If you see him again, you’re just going to shoot him?”

“It’s what he would have wanted,” May answered.

“What the hell happened to you, May?” She yelled. “You fought harder than any of us to keep him here! You were right alongside me, every step of the way. We would have let the world burn before we let anything happen to him!”

“I know. And we failed.”

The air dried up in Daisy’s throat. A moan escaped her as a shaky gasp.

“I failed,” May continued. “It was my… it was more than my job. It was everything to me. Keeping him safe. I didn’t have his gift for comfort or command, but I could protect him so he could protect the people who couldn’t fight for themselves. He is—was, what made me a good person. He was what made me see the good in other people. I—

“You’re right. I would have done anything to save him. But it wasn’t enough. It was never enough.”

“May—

“The only thing I can do now is keep him safe,” May whispered.

“By killing him?” Daisy demanded.

“By killing the thing that took his body.”

Daisy opened her mouth and closed it. The pain emanating from the older agent was palpable. It wasn’t fair. None of this was fair. She had been through too much to be in this kind of pain. May deserved some kind of closure. But nothing she had heard had convinced her that putting a bullet in the person that looked like her former partner would bring her any peace.

“Please,” Daisy begged. “I don’t understand. Before you left for Tahiti, you were… not okay with this. What did he do? What did he say to you that would make you give up, even if there was a chance that we could have him back with us?”

May’s mouth turned down in a sad smile.

“He gave me time,” she said. “He gave me a chance to understand that it was time to let him go.”

A dry laugh bubbled up in Daisy’s throat.

“Five days was enough time to convince you to stop doing what you’ve done for the last twenty years?”

May grew silent and Daisy’s sarcastic laughter rang hollow. May’s probing stare made her feel like she was being evaluated and was somehow coming up short. There was a charge between them like the tension between lightning and a thunderclap.

“It wasn’t five days, Daisy,” May said at last. “It was five years.”


	3. Chapter 3

Daisy watched May’s hands robotically as they flew over the switches that ignited the quinjet’s engines.

_“Five years…”_

She assumed they had disappeared like the rest of them. Why wouldn’t they have? She thought the whole world had turned to dust that day. Everyone in the Zephyr’s cockpit had dissolved into ash as they departed Tahiti. She was the last to go.

It was the most terrifying moment of her life, watching the ground fill the windscreen of the plane as it crashed into the jungle with no one to pull it out of a nosedive. She could still hear her screams when she popped back into existence alongside Simmons, Mack, Yo-Yo, and Davis. None of them had a clue how much time had passed.

In the days of chaos that followed, she and the others had more or less gotten the gist of what had happened. Not everyone had vanished. Some had been left to pick up the pieces of a shattered world with no idea that the people they had lost would ever return.

Daisy had tried not to think about what it must have been like for them. She had enough to deal with helping Mack get SHIELD back on course in the year that followed. But she never considered that Coulson or May had been left behind.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Daisy asked.

May stared resolutely at the control panel, focusing too intently on retracting the landing gear.

“You didn’t ask,” she answered.

Daisy dug her fingernails into the seat in frustration in lieu of rolling her eyes. She took a deep breath and told herself to be patient. There was no telling what May had been through while everyone was gone. She had to approach this delicately.

“What was it like, May?”

She did not get a reply to that. Part of her did not expect to. Still, something in those intervening years had changed her. She had to know what it was.

“Did something bad happen?”

May twisted her hands in a death grip on the yoke.

“Yeah,” she said. “You died. Our team died. Half of the world disappeared.”

Daisy looked ahead into the night sky, searching it as if it could give her answers. It was a stupid question, but it was not what she meant.

She knew it had to be unimaginably horrible to try and cope with that kind of loss. But May and Coulson had each other. That had to count for something. How could losing everyone in her life make her so determined to give up on the one person who had been there with her through everything?

“May—

“What do you want to hear, Daisy?” She asked. “That we missed you? That we went crazy trying to find you and even crazier when we couldn’t figure out a way to get you back? We did. That we moved on? We didn’t. Not really.”

Daisy bit her lip. She could not think of a thing to say. There was nothing that would be able to erase what had happened.

“It took a while,” May continued, softly. “But things got better. We got better. We had… we made a life for ourselves.”

“Out here?”

“It’s Clint Barton’s house,” she explained, with a trace of a smile. “He lost his family. Then he lost himself. Coulson said we should move in and keep an eye on it so things would be the same when everyone returned.”

“He believed that we would come back?”

The certainty in May’s eyes when she finally turned to look at her seared her like an acetylene torch.

“Always,” she said.

Daisy concentrated on swallowing to regulate the equilibrium in her ears as the quinjet climbed higher into the stratosphere. It distracted her from the ache that had settled in her chest.

“He was there with you the whole time,” Daisy stated. “But when we got back…”

She had gotten the phone call that told her that Coulson was dead. There was nothing about it that she had not feared or excepted. Nothing to suggest he and May had done anything except for spend his last days relaxing on a beach in the Pacific (presumably after a dusty intermission.)

“What happened, May?”

She sighed.

“The Avengers happened,” she said. “For years, the ones that were left raced around the globe putting out fires. There wasn’t much we could do but watch. But then something changed. We saw a chance to help. And we couldn’t sit back on the sidelines anymore.”

_One Year Earlier_

_“Half of all living things…”_

_“Perfect balance.”_

For five years, the world that survived the Decimation cobbled together scraps of information from that day, trying to make sense of what had happened. Theories explaining why certain people lived while others had vanished ran wild.

May was one of the few who knew the truth.

It was supposed to have been completely random.

_“Fair to rich and poor alike.”_

But it wasn’t.

Somehow, “half of all living things” meant that some people lost everyone they loved while others did not even know what had happened until they saw the news.

Standing amongst the ravaged bodies that were the result of Clint Barton’s latest handiwork, she was more convinced than ever that there was nothing arbitrary about Thanos’s genocide. The Disappeared may not have been selected based on social status or income, but without them, those left behind fell into the basest version of humanity. They stole, fought, and killed each other with a rage borne from mad grief.

Thanos had taken everyone in this world that was good.

“Hey. Don’t go there again, May.”

In spite of their grotesque surroundings, her lips twitched of their own accord, threatening to break into a smile.

“He didn’t take everyone that was good,” Phil Coulson continued, coming up behind her. “You’re still here.”

It had become his mantra over the last few years, breaking her out of her despair. Of course, it was not his logic that convinced her that she was wrong. It was the fact that he was there to say it at all.

He was the one flaw in her theory.

She lost everyone that day. Her whole team was reduced to dust. Her parents were gone.

But Phil was still here.

Five years after the growing necrosis should have stopped his heart, he was still beside her, sifting through the ashes, fighting with her, and giving her hope that things could be alright again. He still believed that they could come back. She believed it because he needed that hope so badly. She believed because she was afraid of what would happen to him if she stopped.

“You sure it’s Barton?” James Rhodes asked, entering the room with a grimace.

She could not blame him.

Five bodies littered the concrete floor of the compound. Each was disemboweled with a single stroke. None of the wounds would have resulted in instant death. Streaks of blood and claw marks on the floor showed that some of the wounded tried to crawl for the door before succumbing to their injuries.  
Coulson wore a deep frown.

“It fits the pattern we’ve been tracking,” he replied. “Gangs involved in human trafficking seem to be a favorite of his.”

“Last week, it was gun-runners in Rio,” Rhodey pointed out.

“He takes what he can get,” May said, standing up and tossing her latex gloves in a bag marked ‘biohazard.’

“So all of this is just…”

“Vengeance,” Coulson muttered.

The death of Barton’s family had sent him spiraling out of control and he was accelerating.

“I’ve got to call this in to Nat,” Rhodey said grimly. “Any ideas where he’s heading next?”

“We’ve got a line on one of his contacts,” Coulson told him. “Guy out of Seville making travel arrangements, sending him supplies, feeding him intel…”

“Natasha’s not going to like this. I’ve got to give her a lead. If anyone can stop him, it’s her,” Rhodey said. “How fast can you get something out of this guy?”

“How fast can you spare a quinjet?” May retorted.

***

Recently, there were moments that it felt like the old days.

May felt like she was getting a glimpse of the life that she would have had if Bahrain had never happened. She was working with Coulson, alongside what was left of the Avengers, helping to make the world a better place.

The illusion never lasted long.

After all, in her very infrequent “what if” daydreams, Clint Barton was not a homicidal maniac. Tony Stark had not holed up in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. The world was not half crazed with rage and sorrow. And there wasn’t a hole in her chest that her family used to fill.

Then again, even if they had never been sent to Bahrain, she could have never imagined that “home” for her would be an empty farmhouse that she shared with Phil Coulson. She never would have thought that she could be content going years before she was called back into the fight.

Losing nearly everyone she loved had taught her to appreciate every moment that she had with the people that were left.

“… probably tomorrow morning,” Coulson was saying. “We’ll call when we get back into U.S. airspace. Okay. Thanks, Mike.”

He hung up the phone and slid into the seat in the cockpit beside her.

“Everything okay?” She asked.

“Fine.”

“You’re tense,” she prodded.

Coulson let out a breath.

“First time we got to see Barton’s work up close,” he said.

“The pictures didn’t do it justice,” she agreed.

Tracking him remotely from the farmhouse was one thing. Being next to the sights and smells of the carnage was something neither one of them was prepared for.

Coulson shook his head.

“I knew he was hurting,” he said. “I just never thought he’d go this far.”

May set the controls to autopilot and took her hands off the yoke so she could give him her full attention.

“Are you sure that’s all that’s bothering you?”

His ‘agent’ mask fell away and he conceded defeat with a tired half-smile.

“Would you think any less of me if I said I’d rather be home right now?” He asked.

May shook her head.

“You’re not the only one,” she said. “There are a lot of parts of this job I do not miss.”

“Me either,” he agreed. “But if this helps get the Avengers back together…”

“You really think they’ll find a way to fix all of this?”

“They are the only ones who can.”

It had been decades since the Avengers Initiative had been activated and he still had faith in the project. He had faith in them. May did not know why she was surprised. He had died for his belief. It was that resolute passion that made people gravitate to him, trust him, fight for him. It was one of the many reasons she was with him now. But she still could not pretend that she understood it. He was so damn sure they were all going to be whole again.

“What happens when his family comes back?” Coulson wondered aloud. “How is he going to be able to look at them?”

Her gaze slipped to the console between them.

“Not everyone has your faith,” she whispered.

“Hey.”

He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

“We’re going to get them back, Melinda,” he insisted.

She could not help but reward his earnest stare with a wan smile.

“I know,” she said. “I have you to remind me.”

***

The streets of the neighborhood west of Seville were like any place after the Decimation, piled high with broken furniture, electronics, and rotting trash on either side. May was reminded why they chose to live far outside the urban sprawl. She had to fight not to choke when she inhaled the sunbaked stench of decay on their way to the apartment of Barton’s contact.

“251?” She asked again.

Coulson searched the peeling paint on each door for some indication of an address and nodded.

“I think this is it,” he decided, reaching for his gun.

She raised an eyebrow.

“Look, you may not need it, but not everyone has your finesse for killing people with their bare hands,” he said.

“I thought we were just here to talk,” May countered.

“Yeah, well. This guy is responsible for sending Clint on murder sprees around the globe. Never hurts to be prepared.”

The door fell apart with a well-placed kick and May followed him up the darkened stairwell. Empty pizza boxes and garbage bags hindered their progress as they made their way up to the second floor. The only sound in the building was the creak of wood beneath their feet.

Apartment 251 was last apartment at the end of a long corridor. Coulson twisted the knob experimentally and glanced back at May when the door creaked open at his touch. She frowned and nodded, following him at a close pace.

They did not have to go far.

The front doorway opened into a living room that had been converted into a makeshift control center. Warm Spanish sun poured in from a balcony on the southern wall, illuminating nests of wires that linked rows of monitors to CPUs. Every spare inch of wall-space had been decorated with a collage of maps overlaid with clandestine headshots. Some had been crossed out with red marker. Others were so heavily graffitied with notes, the subject of the photo was barely visible.

In the middle of it all sat a single figure wearing a grey hoodie, slumped over a keyboard.

“Turn around slowly,” Coulson commanded. “Keep your hands where we can see them.”

“Coulson?” The figure croaked.

May’s eyes narrowed as the man straightened up and pushed the hoodie off of his head.

“Hands where we can see them!” She repeated, suddenly cursing herself for not bringing a weapon.

“You can shoot me,” the man said, turning around. “But I think we both know it won’t do any good.”

Coulson’s grip on his weapon faltered and his hands fell to his sides.

“Robbie?”


	4. Chapter 4

“You’re the one who sent that intel to Clint,” Coulson said. “Is this your new gig? Outsourcing vengeance?” 

Robbie Reyes smiled sadly and leaned back in the desk chair with his fingers steepled beneath his chin. 

“You know it’s not me, Coulson,” he explained. “I’m just the passenger now. The Rider calls all of the shots.”

“Is it him?” May demanded. “The Ghost Rider? Did he take Barton too?”

Robbie shook his head. 

“There’s only one Rider and he’s with me,” he said. “But there’s more than enough vengeance to go around these days. Everything fell apart after Thanos. More people started stepping up to take advantage of others.”

“That’s where you come in,” Coulson surmised. 

“That’s where the _Rider_ came in,” Robbie corrected. “There are plenty of angry people out there. You guys must know that better than most. Plenty of people wanting justice that can’t get it. The Rider saw an opportunity.”

“To recruit mercenaries,” May said. 

He nodded. 

May scoffed in disgust. 

“You think it’s better that they killed innocent people?” Robbie asked. “These people were hurting. They were going to spread the pain around one way or another. At least the Rider’s directing it to people that deserve it.”

She could almost hear Mack’s voice in her head, chastising the man for playing judge, jury, and executioner. But Mack was gone. And as appalled as she was by the carnage wrought by Robbie’s thugs, she was having a hard time faulting his logic. 

She cast a fleeting glance at Coulson, who shook his head. 

They could not stop him even if they were sure it was the right thing to do. Besides, it wasn’t their mission. 

“You guys here to arrest me?” Robbie asked. “Throw me in some special SHIELD prison?”

“There is no SHIELD anymore,” Coulson said. “We’re all just people now.”

Even Robbie had to grimace at the resignation in his tone. 

“Why are you here?” He asked quietly.

“We’re tracking Clint Barton,” May cut in. “One of your recruits. Former Avenger. Just hacked a cartel involved in sex-trafficking to pieces in Mexico.”

“Yeah,” Robbie said. “I know Barton. What have you guys got planned for him? I gotta tell you, if you’re going to take him out, the Rider’s not going to like it.”

“We’re not killing anyone,” Coulson said. “Just want to put him in contact with some old friends.”

“We need to know where he’s heading next,” May added.

Robbie nodded slowly and slid his chair over to the closest monitor. A few clicks on the keyboard and a map illuminated the screen. A single target hovered over Japan.

“Tokyo?” Coulson asked. 

“Yeah,” Robbie confirmed. “Low-level Yakuza stepped up their game after the Snapture. He’ll be there in 0800 hours.”

May nodded at Coulson and headed for the door. The sooner she could get away from the command center of vengeance, the better. It was not just the concept that appalled her, it was the despair that clung to the walls of this place. There was no punishment they could have cooked up for Robbie that would have been worse than what the Ghost Rider was doing to him. He was a shadow haunting his own life, nothing more than a vessel to carry out the demon’s bidding. 

“Is that it?” He asked. “You’re not going to try to stop me?”

“Like you said, we could try, but we all know it wouldn’t do any good.” Coulson said. “But this isn’t forever, Robbie. You know that, right? The people we lost aren’t going to stay dead. This world that the Rider is working in, it’s just temporary.”

The young man rested his chin on a fist, appraising him thoughtfully. 

“Well, I guess if anyone would know about cheating death, it’s you,” he said. 

Coulson frowned and turned away.

“Coulson?” Robbie called out. “How are you still alive anyway? After you made that deal, I would have given you six months tops.”

“I had a good reason to keep going,” he replied. 

May waited in the hall and tried to ignore the chill that raised goosebumps on her arms when he closed the door behind him. They did everything they were supposed to. They walked away with the intel and no one was hurt. But she could not shake the feeling that going there was a mistake. 

“Rhodie?”

She started at the sound of Coulson’s voice filling the empty hallway. 

“Tell Natasha he’s heading for Tokyo,” he continued, speaking into the phone. “Yeah, we’re on our way back… Really? You’re sure? Okay, boss. We’ll head that way.”

He returned the phone to his jacket pocket and stared ahead blindly.

“Phil?”

When he turned to back to her, his eyes burned brighter than she had seen them in years.

“They have a plan, May.”

“What?”

“They have a plan to get the Stones,” he told her. “They can do it. They can bring everyone back.”

May reached out for the stair banister and steadied herself. 

“How?” She managed.

“I’ll explain on the way,” he said, hurrying down the stairs. “There’s just one thing we need to do to help put all of the pieces together.”

“What’s that?”

“Convince Tony Stark.”

***

They had been to Stark’s cabin a few times since he had hung up everything to live a life of obscurity. Coulson reasoned that there was no point in keeping up the ruse of his demise now that the Avengers were scattered to the four corners. May saw the logic in keeping in touch with one of the few people that might have a lead on fixing this mess, but being around the former billionaire playboy still made her uncomfortable. 

Maybe it was because he was the person that started all of this mess to begin with, however unwittingly. Perhaps some part of her still harbored a grudge for putting Coulson in Loki’s crosshairs. Or maybe it was because he had no tact or discretion and a complete inability to keep his mouth shut.

“So, how’s the family?” Stark asked her, the perfect parody of propriety.

May rolled her eyes and sat up straighter on the couch, not deigning to reply.

“Still not much of a talker, are you?” He continued, rhetorically. “Seriously, where is your better half? Like I told the others, you’re welcome to stay as long as you want, but talking shop is off the table.”

“When was the last time we dropped by for a social call, Stark?” May snapped. “Coulson’s outside on the phone. He’ll be in a minute. Then we can get this over with.”

“Fine by me.”

She was saved from having to make any more pointless banter when the front door banged shut behind her. Coulson made his way into the living room, eschewing the normal handshake and pleasantries for a simple nod of his head before settling on the couch next to May.

“What’s wrong, Agent?” Stark asked. “You look like the dry-cleaners mangled your favorite tie.”

May ignored him and gave Coulson a once-over. Stark was not wrong. His face was drained of all color and he looked like he was seconds away from being sick. Sensing her concern, Coulson shot her a shade of a smile before turning their attention to the situation at hand. 

“Rhodie briefed us on the plan,” he started succinctly. “He thinks he can get everyone else on board. You’re the only one who seems to have doubts.”

Stark scoffed lightly and ran a hand over his beard. 

“Doubts with the ‘time heist’ plan?” He asked. “Yeah, I’ve got a few. Foremost being the ‘time’ part of it.”

“You don’t think it can be done?” May asked.

“You did hear the part where we build a time machine, right?” 

“Scott Lang’s already got an idea of how that can be done,” Coulson countered.

“Right,” he said. “The safe-cracker with the ant costume has an idea about how to build a time machine.”

May and Coulson opened their mouths to retort, but he cut them off.

“Look, forget the ‘how,’” he said, impatiently. “Do either of you know anything about quantum mechanics? The laws of spacetime?”

“Enough to know that they’re bullshit,” May answered.

“Well,” Stark declared, clapping his hands together. “Since the SHIELD assassin says so—

“Watch it,” Coulson warned him. “Tony, we talked about this. What happened to us while I was gone. I told you about traveling to the future. How we broke the time loop.”

“Yeah, saved the world from breaking apart just in time for Thanos to kill half the universe,” he said. “Never got to thank you for that.”

May jumped up with her fists clenched. One wrong move would be all the excuse she needed to punch his arrogant ass through the plate glass coffee table. 

“For once in your life, just shut up and listen,” Coulson demanded, taking a stand beside her. “You have a chance, one chance, to fix everything. Time is not fixed. We’ve seen it for ourselves. You do this right, you bring the Stones to this time, and you can get everyone back.”

Tony Stark surveyed the two former agents looming over him with a deep frown. He leaned back in the recliner and crossed his arms.

“You’re forgetting the flip side of this scenario, Phil,” he said. “What if we don’t do this right? Spacetime, multiverse, whatever theory your subscribe to, we change the wrong thing in the past and some version of us somewhere could lose everything.”

His gaze slipped from their stern expressions and fell to a framed picture of Pepper and their daughter on the mantel. In spite of herself, May felt a stab of sympathy for the fallen Avenger.

“If it were you, would you take that risk?” He persisted. “You have as much to lose as I do.”

Once again, May was glad that Coulson was the focus of his interrogation. Stark did not get under his skin the way he did her. He had a rare gift for honing in on people’s pressure points and pushing until they conceded defeat. Coulson was one of the few people who remained immune to his needling.

“I have as much to gain as you do, too,” he replied. “I know about the Parker kid—

“Rhodie’s got a big mouth,” Stark muttered.

“You two were close,” Coulson continued. “I know what that’s like. Finding someone who looks up to you, who loves you even when you can’t figure out why. If I had the chance, I’d do anything to have that back again.

“We both know that for everything we have gained in the last five years, we have lost more. But you’re right: there is too much at stake to go into this half-cocked. So you go through with this, you better commit all the way. You do this right and we don’t have to lose anyone.”

“Might lose ourselves though,” Stark pointed out.

“It’s worth it,” Coulson snapped. “The person you were fifteen years ago was too narcissistic to understand that, but I’m hoping that at some point along the way you’ve figured out that you’re not the center of the universe. Nothing about this is easy. You may have to make some sacrifices to keep the world spinning.”

“You could do that, huh?”

“He has,” May reminded him. “More than once.”

“I’d do it again,” Coulson said softly. “Whatever it takes.”

Whenever May thought back to it, the rest of their meeting with Tony Stark was a half-remembered haze. She vaguely recalled the uncertainty that had settled on him. His retorts came without their sting and his mind seemed to be somewhere else. They left the cabin convinced that if he had not come around to the ‘time heist’ plan yet, he would soon.

May’s thoughts were otherwise preoccupied. There was nothing alarming about what Coulson had said in the cabin. She knew that he had sacrificed himself and would do it again if it meant that his team and family would be safe. There was something in his voice that she could not shake off though, something more than abstract. 

The entire flight home, as he slept in the cockpit next to her, his last words filled in her head.

_“Whatever it takes.”_ ****

_Present_

“…after that?”

“Hm?” May asked.

She closed her eyes for a second to clear her vision. 

“You guys met with Iron Man,” Daisy reiterated. “Coulson was still fine then, right? What happened after that?”

‘What happened after that’ was something that May had mulled over incessantly for months before packing it away and trying to forget. It was no use. Out of all of their time together, those last days were what she remembered the most vividly. She hated him a little for that.

“Everyone came back,” she answered, tonelessly. “And he died.”

_What? Why?!_

With those six words, a white hot flash of fury surged from Daisy’s head to her fingertips. If she was not careful, she would quake the jet apart from under them.

He was fine! They could have seen each other! They could have been a family again!

How could he have left just when they had returned? 

May talked over Daisy’s internal monologue of self-righteous anger and she had to force her head to shut up so she did not miss anything. 

“… saved some of the serum that she put in the syringe, just in case Coulson refused to take it,” she was saying. “It wasn’t enough to cure him. Just enough so that he would have time to say goodbye. It was supposed to last a few weeks. It lasted five years. 

“After a while, I thought it would stick. All that time, I thought he was holding on for… what we had. The life that we built together. He wasn’t. He was holding on for you. He lived long enough to make sure our team was alive and safe. Once he knew that you were, there was nothing keeping him here.”

The rage that had set Daisy’s body on fire cooled and was replaced with something that felt infinitely worse. 

“That can’t be true,” she whispered.

May shook her head with a tight-lipped grimace.

“As soon as the news broke that everyone had returned, he collapsed,” she intoned. “He held on for a few more days, but never fully regained consciousness. The few times he could speak, he made me promise to let him go. To make sure that he never came back.

“It was like the last five years never happened. He was right back where we started. Ready to die as soon as his mission was completed.”

“How could you…” Daisy started. “After all that, weren’t you mad?”

She was surprised she could make her lips form the words. Every part of her had gone numb.

May replied with a mirthless smirk.

“I was furious,” she said.

She swallowed and fiddled with some of the settings on control panel unnecessarily. Daisy recognized the need to keep quiet to give her time to collect herself.

“It took a while,” she said, at last. “But I realized that I was mad at him for being the person he always was: a protector. He lived to make sure everyone else was safe. He was ready to go when you dropped us in Tahiti. Everyone disappearing gave him a reason to keep living. Now, I just … I’m glad I got more time with him.” 

Daisy’s anger returned. Cooler and more controlled than it was before, but still churning her stomach and making her jaw ache from clenching her teeth. She wanted to yell and demand how May could be so calm after he just _left_ her to carry on without him. 

But she was not the source of her anger.

She thought she knew Coulson, at least as well as anyone could know a professional spy. His chosen career had conditioned him to be more closed off with his feelings than most, but he always made sure that the people he loved knew how much he cared when they needed it. 

Maybe he could not help dying. Maybe his time was just up. But _never_ could she have imagined that Coulson would leave Melinda May believing that she was worth so little to him.

“I did everything I could to protect him,” May told her. “But you can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.”

“If you think that he really…” She could not finish the thought out loud. “Why keep protecting him? Why is it so important that you keep your promise?”

May glanced at her out of the corner of her eye. Daisy realized that she had asked another stupid question.

“You know why,” she said, quietly.

And Daisy had thought Fitz was the only hopeless romantic on their team. May could give him a run for his money.

“Daisy?” May asked. “Everything else aside, just ask yourself, if you could bring him back, would it be for him or for you?”

She did not have an answer to that.

Every thought in her head was replaced with white noise. She did not know anymore. Nothing was making sense.

This was all wrong. There was a piece missing. There had to be something she was not seeing. Maybe even May did not know what it was. The Coulson she knew would not have left like that unless he had no other choice. 

If she could bring him back right now, it would be to demand to know why he had died when he did.

“Dai—

_“This is SHIELD control to Quinjet 4. May, Daisy? Do you copy?”_

May snapped to attention and touched the side of her headset. 

“Copy, Mack,” she replied. “Go ahead.”

 _“We’ve got another sighting of the Coulson-imposter and his thugs in St. Louis,”_ Mack told them. _“First responder reports are spotty. Radio feed keeps breaking up. But it looks like there have already been casualties. We need eyes on the ground. I’ve got a team en route, but they’re still forty minutes out.”_

The women locked eyes and Daisy replied. 

“We can be there in twenty, Mack.”

 _“Okay,”_ he said. _“Work with the local authorities to see what you can do about containing this thing.”_

“Sir, permission to use lethal force to subdue the hostile?” May asked. 

Daisy looked away. 

Her head was spinning. This was happening too fast. She needed more time to make sense of everything.

Seconds ticked by and they received no reply.

“Mack?” May asked again.

 _“Do what you have to, May,”_ he said. _“I trust your judgement.”_

“Acknowledged.”

Daisy’s stomach lurched as the quinjet changed course in midair. She had no idea what she would do if she saw Coulson’s doppelganger now. 

She had less than half an hour to make up her mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the record, I actually love Tony Stark. He’s my favorite Avenger (Coulson excepted.) But I like him the best when he is being snarky. Unfortunately, for this story, May and Coulson had to be in the snark crosshairs, which resulted in him looking like a bit of an ass.


	5. Chapter 5

By the time that they arrived at the scene, St. Louis’s finest had secured a two-block parameter around the site of the attack. Civilians jostled each other on the far side of the wooden barricade, hoping to catch a glimpse of the smoking ruin where the old security building had stood unscathed less than an hour before. After landing the quinjet in a nearby park, the two agents fought their way through the crowd of evacuees and onlookers for a good five minutes before Daisy flashed her badge and shouted for everyone to clear a path. It had been so long since identifying herself as an agent was even an option, May had not even considered it. 

At the word “SHIELD,” the mass of bystanders quieted and made a space just wide enough to let the two women slip through. Crossing the barrier, May surveyed the damage as Daisy introduced herself to the first responder team huddled around a cluster of parked police vehicles. 

It was just like the first attack. Streetlights illuminated the haze of dust and debris that still hung in the air from the aerial bombardment that had reduced the eleven-story building to a hollow husk of scaffolding and granite. 

“At this point, we don’t know if there was anyone on the inside when the place blew,” the police chief told Daisy. “The building was outfitted for office space. Most of the staff would have gone home for the day.”

She nodded and surveyed the wreckage two streets ahead of them. 

“Okay,” she said. “Any signs of hostiles on site?”

“The first unit we sent in was repelled by gunfire,” the chief replied. “Two officers injured. Another critical. Bullet wound, lower abdomen.”

May closed her eyes briefly.

“Did you get a description of the assailants?” she asked.

The chief turned to her with a raised eyebrow, just noticing her standing behind him.

“Officers reported seeing at least three suspects, two men, one woman,” he said. “Lightly armed. No flak jackets. And no fucking idea where they came from.”

“Eyewitnesses all say the same thing: a beam of light came down, leveled the place, and then these guys appeared out of nowhere,” he explained.

May could feel both Daisy and the police chief boring a hole in her side with a questioning glare, but she focused her attention on the wreckage in front of them, scanning for signs of life. Signs that _he_ was in there. 

“So, what are you guys thinking?” He asked, when he received no reply. “Aliens?”

May broke off her surveillance long enough to raise an eyebrow at the man. 

“Hey,” he defended, hands raised. “You _are_ SHIELD, right? Isn’t this kind of thing your wheelhouse?”

“Aliens don’t usually use the kind of guns that leave bullet holes,” Daisy remarked. 

“Not usually,” May muttered, under her breath.

The man ran a hand over his ruddy face and sighed. 

“Look, I’ve got a sniper team getting in position now,” he told them. “They don’t have eyes on the hostiles yet, but when they do, it’d be nice to know if their weapons are going to leave a mark or just piss these guys off.”

May considered their options. 

As much of a relief as it would be to have the imposter posing as her late partner taken out by an anonymous sniper, she needed to be the one to do it herself. It was the only way she could make sure that the job was really done. 

_“It’s the only way that you’ll know for sure that he’s not still in there, somewhere,”_ an irritating voice in her head mocked her.

May scowled and took a step towards the police chief. Just because she knew what had to be done did not mean she wanted to charge into a firefight without a plan.

“These suspects,” she said. “They haven’t attempted to make contact? Issue any demands or claim some sort of affiliation?”

“No, ma’am,” he told her. 

“And there has been no gunfire towards civilians outside the building?”

“Doesn’t seem so,” he confirmed. “The only shots we know of were directed at my team.”

Daisy gave a voice to May’s thoughts.

“What’s the point, then?” She asked. “Even if it was just to make a statement by destroying this place, why hang around?”

“Maybe they’re waiting for something,” May said. “Or someone.”

Daisy flashed a weak smile at the chief before asking to be excused for a moment to “talk with her colleague.” May followed her lead and joined her at the parameter, just out of earshot of the response team. 

“You think this whole thing was to draw us out?” Daisy asked. 

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they chose _him_ ,” She replied. “Or that they’ve launched two attacks with what looks like alien-tech.”

“They’re trying to get SHIELD’s attention,” Daisy concluded, with a sigh. “Well, they’ve got it. But Coul—the man in the footage said he’d never heard of SHIELD.”

“I don’t think whoever is in there is calling the shots, Daisy,” May replied, feeling sick to her stomach.

Daisy nodded, looking a few shades greener herself. 

“So, this is a trap, then?”

"A trap,” May considered. “Or a distraction. A trick to divert our attention away from something bigger.”

“So, what’s our play?”

May sized up the husk of the building.

“We give them what they want.”

***

The sniper team was given orders to hold their fire while May and Daisy entered the building. The chief was hesitant to give in to their request, but seemed satisfied enough when they assured him it was the best way not to risk the lives of any more of his officers. 

Minutes later, the two agents were outfitted in Kevlar and closing in on the building with their weapons at the ready. They paused five yards away from the doorway, neither seeing nor hearing anything that indicated that the hostiles were aware of their approach. 

“Okay,” Daisy muttered. “What now?”

May’s eyes darted along the granite edifice, searching for movement in any of the darkened windows. 

“I was hoping we could draw them out,” she admitted. “I don’t like our odds ambushing them inside.”

“Backup is just five minutes out,” Daisy reminded her. “We could wait.”

May shook her head slightly. 

“If this is a trap, that’s just what they want,” she said. “Once those quinjets get here, they could take out half of SHIELD in one blow.”

“Okay,” Daisy breathed. “So, we go in.”

May hesitated for a fraction of a second, then nodded. 

“Cover me,” she directed, leaving no room for argument, as she covered the last few steps at a clipped pace. 

There was no one there to meet them at the entrance, no gunfire or shouts of warning. With her back against the outer doorframe, May peered into the gloom. She took a calculated risk, hoping that her eyes could adjust before anyone on the inside noticed her. From the other side of the entryway, Daisy used her phone’s camera to peek around the side of the door into the dark.

In a narrow space amongst the debris, three shadows stood around a device made of what looked like metallic scaffolding. It towered over them, some fifteen feet in height. The largest of the three figures knelt on the ground, fixing one of the four legs of the instrument in place with a glowing soldering tool. 

“That’s just about got it,” he grunted. 

The voice was guttural and deep. Not Coulson.

Daisy retracted her phone and looked to May. 

She knew without asking that they were thinking the same thing.

Whatever that thing was designed to do, it could not be good. 

May pointed at Daisy, then at the device. She held up her hand, imitating a quake blast. Daisy nodded in understanding. May pointed to herself, then at the two figures standing apart from the scaffolding. Daisy’s replying nod came slower this time. 

May narrowed her eyes, making certain she had her full attention before counting down to their entrance in three, two, one…

The blast that shook and toppled the frame was significant enough to knock the two bystanders off their feet. The large man at the base of the scaffold tower was buried beneath it when it collapsed. May took advantage of the confusion and closed in on the prone forms of the two remaining hostiles. One of them lifted up her head, giving May a full view of her face. 

She fired three rounds center mass. 

The woman fell and did not get back up. 

Two down. 

_He_ was the only one left.

May crept towards the two fallen figures across a marble floor strewn with rebar and fragments of concrete. Her eyes narrowed in on the man on the right, searching for the telltale rise and fall of his chest from where she stood ten feet away. 

She had not hit him. She was sure of that. 

“Is he…?”

May did not answer Daisy’s unasked question. 

The man’s features were still obscured by darkness. Streetlights shining through the entrance provided the only reprieve from the gloom.

Gun leveled at his chest, May deliberately scuffed her boot on the floor. 

The man’s eyes shot open and he barrel-rolled away from his fallen associate, grabbing his sidearm as he went. May’s arms ached from the effort it took not to holster her weapon when he stood to face her. 

_“It’s not him. It’s not him. It’snothim.It’snothim.It’sNOThim!”_

But it was.

It was his body. His face. His eyes. 

Her vision blurred at the edges. The oxygen she gulped down was doing nothing to steady her.

“May…?” Daisy asked softly.

The Coulson-imposter used her divided attention as an opportunity to raise his weapon. Right away, a tremor vibrated down his arm. He stared at the gun, bewildered, as it shook apart in his hand before he could fire it. 

May’s breath caught in her throat.

_“Do it!”_ Her mind screamed at her. 

The man looked from May to the woman who stood behind her, glaring, with a hand raised in his direction. May’s hesitation lasted long enough for him to get a glimpse of the dead woman at his feet. She knew what he was going to do before he made a move and still she could not make herself squeeze the trigger. 

He ran. 

May lost sight of him in seconds. 

“Shit,” she hissed.

“Maybe we should—

“Daisy, look out!”

Crawling out from beneath the heap of twisted steel behind her was the third hostile. He had Daisy in a choke hold before she knew what was happening. May took two steps toward her before she had slammed her head into the man’s nose, knocking him off balance. 

May’s attention turned back to the man she had let escape. 

He had been right there. She had a clean shot and she froze up. 

Her head swiveled between Daisy and the darkness that had swallowed up the man with Coulson’s face. Daisy was free of the headlock. Although the giant of a man she fought did not show any sign of fatigue, May knew that she was not in any real danger. 

But other people would be, if she could not collect herself and follow through with her promise. With one last glance at the younger agent, May ran headlong into the dark.

The building was a maze of rubble full of dead ends. With no Mapping Eyewear goggles, she had no night-vision to help her navigate the empty pockets and walls of broken brick. There was no reason to think that he was even still there. Whatever technology they had used to infiltrate this place could have easily transported him out again.

Except that she felt him. 

It was a sense that she could not have articulated even if anyone had been there to ask. A slight prickle on her skin. A pull in her gut. A nagging in her unconscious mind that could not be explained any more than it could be ignored. 

She felt her way around a pile of marble and there he was. 

In a space that had once been an elevator bank, Not-Coulson stood with a flashlight between his teeth, using the glow to illuminate a metallic box covered in dials and switches. He grimaced from the effort of twisting one of the knobs until it emitted a muffled click. An upturned quirk of his mouth indicated that he had succeeded in whatever he was trying to do. 

She could have ended it right then. 

She had a perfect vantage point, just outside his field of vision. 

He would never even know what had happened.

“Why did you take him?”

The box clattered to the floor and May was blinded by the light he shined in her face.

She raised her gun, not fearing retribution. Daisy had seen to it that he was unarmed. 

“Who?” The man asked. 

His voice mocked her. It was _his_ voice. A sound that she known and trusted for half of her life. That _thing_ had stolen it along with everything else.

“You know who,” she growled.

“You knew him,” the man realized, lowering the beam of light just a fraction. “Is that why you let me live?”

_“Let me go, Melinda.”_

From a buried corner of her memory, half-lidded blue eyes pleaded with her. Those same eyes stared back at her now. But there was nothing behind them. May ground her teeth, feeling vomit swell in the back of her throat. 

“He must have meant a lot to you,” he continued, inching toward her. “You’ve seen what I’ve done. You know what I can do. You’d really let me live, even at the expense of saving others?”

_“She’s safe now,”_ the memory-voice continued, slurring from delirium. 

He was getting too close. Another few steps and he would have her weapon. Still, she could not force her fingers to obey her commands.

“It’s admirable,” he remarked. “That kind of loyalty.”

_“…has to be this way… don’t try to bring me back. Don’t let anyone…”_

“Answer the question,” May demanded. 

The imposter stopped just arms’ length from her weapon. 

“Wish I had an answer for you,” he replied, with a shrug. “I just go where they tell me.”

_“Promise me. Please.”_

_“I promise, Phil.”_

May tightened her finger on the trigger just as the man made a wild swipe for the gun. A shot rang out and the bullet pierced his jacket before embedding itself in the wall behind him. He stumbled to the side and she took a step back, pointing the gun right at his chest. His eyes widened just a fraction when she fired.

The bullet never reached its target. 

May and the imposter were swept off their feet and thrown against opposite walls. The gun smashed against a slab of concrete behind them and the bullet clanged into the elevator door, quaked off its intended path. 

Through a haze of unspent adrenaline, May watched the man scramble to his feet and make a dive for the discarded metal box. Before she could make sense of what had happened, he had the device in his hand. She may have imagined the grin he flashed her just before he flipped a switch that made the box elicit a high pitched hum. 

A second later, he was gone. 

Time disappeared as she sat there staring at the space that he had occupied.

It was all for nothing. 

No matter what she did, it was always all for nothing. 

All she had left to give him was a promise and she could not even keep it. 

“I’m sorry.”

She would have sat there for another eternity, not realizing that she was not the one who had spoken, if the voice had not called her name. 

May looked behind her and saw Daisy in the glow of the flashlight the man had left behind. Her arm was still half-raised from the blast that had knocked her to the floor.

“Why?” May asked, holding onto the wall to get to her feet. 

“I couldn’t— I can’t give up on him,” Daisy stammered. “I’m sorry, May. I just can’t believe that this is what he would have wanted. I can’t believe that… if there was a chance that he could be back with us, he wouldn’t want us to try.”

She had no reply for her. 

Part of her knew not to expect anything else. Daisy was who she was. 

She had not been there in the end. There was nothing that she could say that would convince her of what she believed to be true.

Later, when she climbed into the quinjet after the backup team arrived to search the wreckage for evidence, May could not remember if she had acknowledged Daisy at all or just left her there alone in the dark. Her mind was blank and she felt completely numb.

The only thing that she could feel was the burden of another failure, threatening to crush her beneath its weight. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up: Daisy discovers another secret in her search for answers about Coulson’s death.


	6. Chapter 6

Back at the base, Daisy made the long walk back to her bunk on feet made of solid lead. All through the on-site debrief and the flight home, she was only half-listening. She could not focus. Every time she blinked, she saw May’s eyes staring back at her. 

Afterlife.

The last time she had last time she looked at her like that, she had just sent her spiraling onto the pavement at Afterlife, trusting her mother’s lies over May’s promises of protection. 

Daisy’s face burned in shame at the memory. 

She had tried to apologize, but something between them was broken for good that day. It had taken a long while for Daisy to understand that May had not continued to keep her at arms’ length out of stubbornness or spite. She just did not want to be hurt again.

But apparently, Daisy had not lost her talent for sticking pins into May’s pressure points. 

She trudged into her bathroom, turned on the tap, and lowered her face into the shallow pool that formed in her hands. The water diluted the salt from her tears and gave her enough of a jolt to come back to herself.

Lack of trust had nothing to do with her actions back in St. Louis. She knew that May was doing what she believed to be right. 

But something about her recollection of Coulson’s last days just did not sit right with her. 

That he died after years of remission just because his team had been returned safely? That he made May promise never to let him be brought back? Did that really include having her _kill_ him if the unthinkable did occur?

May had had a whole year to live with those questions. She had made sense of them the best way that she could. Daisy did not blame her for trying to find some measure of peace with such an impossibly tragic situation, but it did not make her own acceptance of the situation any easier. 

_“If you could bring him back, would it be for him or for you?”_

Daisy examined her blotchy reflection in the mirror and sighed. 

Maybe she was being selfish. Maybe she was just questioning things that she did not want to believe the answers to. 

She was hardly objective. 

But when it came down to brass tacks, Daisy did not have any real quantitative facts. What she had was a death without a scientific cause and a promise extracted with no explanation. Everything else was conjecture.

Maybe there was no way for her to be unbiased, but if she could find some sort of evidence, some tangible facts about Coulson’s last days, then maybe those facts would speak for themselves. They could give her some sort of clue as to how to proceed, one way or another.

And if she was really lucky, maybe they could help her mend the rift between her and her former mentor.

***

It was nearly 2:00 in the morning when Daisy sat down in front of her laptop.

The comfort of her bed was a distant memory at this point, but even if she tried, she knew she would not be able to rest. Not with May’s antipathy haunting her. Not without some way to fix all of this. 

“Okay… medical files…” she muttered, fingers flying over the keys. “Alright Coulson, let’s see if your doctors knew something that May didn’t.”

Her usual search brought up a collection of results that stopped her short.

“Well, crap.”

She must not have had an occasion to check medical files since she had returned from dusty oblivion. The records system had changed. It was a hot mess. Individual electronic medical records’ software providers had not been merged into a single database. There was no documentation at all for 2018 or for half of 2019.

A search for “Phillip J. Coulson, D.O.B. 07/08/1964” revealed 491 hits.

Daisy groaned. 

This could take a while. 

After weeding out duplicate records, tracking down unintegrated charts, and dismissing files for patients that had been miscategorized, she had what she believed to be Coulson’s comprehensive medical history for the last 5 years. The result was a sum total of four entries: 

Two “annual” physicals for 2019 and 2022, both with normal results. An invoice for x-rays and for setting a broken tibia in March of 2021. An update to his vaccination record, indicating he had a flu shot later that year. A clinic visit in 2022 that listed a diagnosis of gastroenteritis caused by mild food poisoning. 

In other words, she had nothing. Less than nothing. By SHIELD’s standards, the results were positively underwhelming. 

Daisy rolled her chair back from the desk and spun around aimlessly, reaching for the cup of coffee on the nightstand behind her.

“Come on, Coulson,” she groaned. “Give me something to work with.”

She peered over her mug at the computer screen, downing the dregs of the cooling coffee with a wince. There was one more entry that she had not checked.

The name “Coulson, Zoe M.” stood out in light blue font on the screen right below “Coulson, Phillip J.” The slapdash notation offered no explanation as to why he was listed in her file. 

“Who the hell is ‘Zoe?’” Daisy muttered. 

Probably some distant relation he had reconnected with after the Snap. Or, more likely, it was just another filing error. 

Daisy kicked at her bed to propel her chair back to the computer. She slammed into the desk with a thunk and clicked on the entry, propping her chin on her hand. After this, she was going to sleep. Just for a few hours. Just long enough for her to—

“Holy shit!”

She zoomed in on the first document in Zoe Coulson’s file, scanning every line with increasing disbelief. She rubbed her eyes and tried to take another drink of coffee, forgetting that the mug was empty. By the time that she had finished reading every line of the document and had convinced herself that it was not a sleep-deprived hallucination, her jaw had almost dropped to the desk.

The form was a birth certificate for “Zoe May Coulson,” born on June 6, 2021. “Melinda Qiaolian May” was listed as the mother. Right beside that was the name of the father, “Phillip James Coulson.”

They had a daughter. 

Coulson and May had a daughter. 

“Damn, May,” Daisy muttered. “Anything else you forget to mention?”

The discovery gave her a jolt of energy and knocked all coherent thought out of her head. She had so many questions, she did not know where to begin. 

“Coffee,” she decided. 

She needed to back away and regroup. 

Standing in the abandoned Lighthouse kitchen, Daisy eschewed the convenience of the Keurig machine for the meditative practice of making herself a pour-over. She glued her eyes to the grinder and filter cone, narrating aloud as she went through the motions. It was a trick she taught herself as a teenager. If she could devote all of her attention to the task at hand, she could drown out the cacophony in her head. Confusion, joy, anger, and jealousy all screamed at her, demanding her attention.

“Pouring hot water over coffee grounds clockwise,” she said, with purpose. 

She waited until the grounds were nearly dry before repeating the motion, counting backwards from thirty out loud. 

It was not working. 

“God, May!” She exclaimed. “Why wouldn’t you tell me something like that?”

She lifted the plastic cone from the top of the mug, waiting for the last few drops to fall. As she stared at the steaming liquid, a horrible possibility occurred to her. 

Maybe the reason May had not mentioned the baby was because there was nothing to tell. Maybe Zoe was not here anymore. 

With her heart in her throat, Daisy dashed back to her bunk, leaving her carefully prepared drink cooling on the kitchen counter. 

“Please,” she muttered, waking up the computer. “Please be alive.”

The little girl’s medical chart was still open on her screen. 

A quick glance went a long way to quiet her fears. Zoe had been to a pediatrician for regular check-ups and vaccines. Nothing in her records indicated that she was anything less than perfectly healthy. 

Daisy allowed herself a small sigh of relief before something in the records caught her eye. 

The last entry was almost a year ago. 

It did not have to mean anything. You did not go to the doctor unless you were sick. She was healthy. That was a good thing.

Her fingers tapped on the desk in frustration. A strange panic that she could not explain or control had taken hold of her. 

All because of May and her goddamned secrecy. 

If that Coulson-pretender had not attacked, would she ever have said a thing about the last six years of her life? She was so determined to keep everything compartmentalized, so intent on sparing everyone from her pain. Anyone who tried to help was met with firewall after firewall. It had taken Coulson a lifetime to get through to her. Now there was no one else to help her shoulder her own burdens. 

But she was going to try anyway. 

Daisy groaned and cracked her knuckles. 

If May found out about this, she would never forgive her. 

***

As a hacker, there were lines that Daisy vowed that she would never cross. Mirroring Melinda May’s hard drive and searching its contents were so far on the other side of those lines, she would have never even considered it under any other circumstances. The hope that this was ultimately to help her did not stop Daisy’s cheeks from burning as her mouse hovered over the “Pictures” icon on May’s desktop and she forced herself to click it.

God. This could be such a mistake. 

“Please, please, please tell me you guys didn’t make any sexy home movies,” she muttered. 

Daisy ran a hand over her eyes and forced herself to look at the monitor.

“You’re starting at the most recent date,” she reminded herself. 

She just needed to see an image of Zoe after Coulson’s death. After that, she would close the application and never look at it again. 

All of May’s pictures and videos were filed into a single folder marked “Iowa.” The most recent photograph was taken two weeks ago, unlabeled but for an arbitrary number. She bit her lip and clicked on the thumbnail.

An image filled her screen, just out of focus. May and a little girl with dark, curly hair looked back at her. They laid head-to-head on a lavender pillow sham. The three-year-old grinned as May pointed at the camera. 

Daisy let out a sharp bark of laughter in relief.

She was alright. 

May’s daughter was alright. 

There was no mistaking who her parents were. She had May’s eyes and Coulson’s teasing smile.

Daisy wiped the moisture from the corner of her left eye and sighed. 

Okay. 

Time to shut it down. 

Her finger lingered over the scroll wheel of the mouse. Just out of curiosity, she scanned through the file to see how many entries there were. It took a while for her to reach the bottom. There had to be over 500 pictures and videos in all. 

Daisy chewed on her lip as her cursor lingered over the first picture. 

_“You shouldn’t do this,”_ her conscience warned her.

“I know that,” she barked back.

But she wanted to know so badly what life was like for them. She wanted to know what she had missed.

She could hate herself about it later. 

The first picture was taken from a distance. May stood on the front porch of Clint Barton’s farmhouse, a tiny figure in profile, oblivious to the photographer. As she clicked through the subsequent photos, Daisy forgot her guilt and just watched. Even with the first years after Thanos’s attack missing, there was still enough here to document a lifetime. 

Most of the earlier stills were variations of the first image, shots of the house and garden in Iowa with May either turned away from or studiously ignoring Coulson. 

She was not surprised. She could almost hear May’s protests at being filmed and Coulson insisting. Of course, he was the primary photographer. May would not have bothered. 

Daisy steeled herself as she clicked “play” on the first video, but it did not stop her eyes from filling with tears when she heard his voice.

 _“…you something,”_ Coulson said. 

The camera focused on an empty kitchen table before panning to the right where May walked through the open door.

“Uh-huh?” She asked skeptically. 

“Yeah, just hold up,” Coulson’s voice came from behind the camera. The lens zoomed in on May. She crossed her arms and sighed in feigned exasperation. 

“Are you filming this?” The May in the video demanded.

“No,” Coulson replied. “There’s just this new feature on my phone and I want to figure out.”

“When did you become such a terrible liar?”

There was no venom in her voice. In spite of her professed irritation, she made no effort to move out of view of the camera. The corners of her mouth turned up in spite of herself. 

It was not their obvious flirtation that made Daisy’s breath catch in her throat though. She hit the spacebar and the video froze on May lingering in the doorway. The white wrap-around dress she wore billowed around her and obscured her figure. When she crossed her arms though, there was no mistaking the round lump in her middle.

"Wow," she said. "I guess that's you, huh, Zoe?"

She hit the spacebar again, her nose inches from the monitor.

“Out of practice, I guess,” came Coulson’s reply. 

“So, is this home movie for posterity?” May asked him.

“Nah, this one is just for me. I like the view.”

May rolled her eyes and ducked her head. 

Daisy hit the “mute” button, feeling her cheeks glow beneath her hands. This was too personal. 

She skipped ahead a few months and breathed a sigh of relief. Countless photos and videos documented the arrival and first years of their child’s life. Genuine smiles replaced May’s façade of long-suffering placation. She took turns with Coulson photographing everything from the sentimental to the mundane. Daisy watched Zoe grow from an infant to a little girl, holding onto her father’s finger with a tiny fist, stumbling gracelessly through the grass in front of their house.

She laughed and cried until her keyboard was wet. She ran to the bathroom, grabbed a towel to mop up her face and computer, then hit “play,” and cried some more.

They really were a family. 

In a few of the pictures, Daisy thought she spied a glimpse of wistfulness or sadness behind their smiles, but she could have well imagined it. They were happy. All three of them.

Then Coulson was gone. 

She scrolled back to the last photo taken before he died. 

The resolution was blurry, but she could still make out their faces. May laid in a bed with her eyes shut and a giant grin on her face, feigning sleep. Coulson held the camera at arms’ length while he leaned in and placed a kiss on the head of the girl sleeping between them.

Daisy closed her laptop with a snap and stared into the space in front of her with determination.

Whatever doubts she had before, they had evaporated.

There was no way in hell that Phil Coulson gave up and died just because he thought his mission was complete. The man in those pictures, the man that she knew, would never have left his family willingly.

If May’s perception had not been distorted by grief and denial and whatever other walls she constructed to survive the past year, she would have seen it as clearly as Daisy did now. There was something else in play here. Coulson never did anything without a reason. 

She was going to find out what it was. 

Then, they could figure out how the hell they were going to get him back.

Hours later, just as the first light of dawn illuminated the windows of the upper stories of the Lighthouse, she found it: evidence that there was more to Coulson’s last days than May had thought. 

When she first saw the image, she thought she had to be mistaken. It was not until she had adjusted the contrast ratio and ran facial recognition twice that she hit “save” and closed her laptop with a satisfying snap.

“Gotcha.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More revelations to come!


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was hoping to have the whole story finished by the season premiere, but it looks like that not going to happen. Oh well, it’s all AU anyway at this point! Hope you enjoy this next bit.

At half past seven in the morning, the control center of the Lighthouse was vacant but for a skeleton support staff. Back in the old days, May would have already been up and reviewing the field reports from the day before. 

She did not live on the base now though. Although Mack had offered her one of the larger suites when she returned two weeks ago, May declined, informing him that she had purchased a house in the town of River’s End. Daisy thought it was odd at the time. Now she understood that she had good reasons for keeping her home life separate from SHIELD. 

Even the short drive to the Lighthouse meant that she arrived later than she used to. Every minute that passed without her being here was putting Daisy more on edge.

Her pacing was making the support staff nervous, but she had too much pent-up energy to keep still.

“Mack!”

The director paused in the doorway with a cup of coffee halfway to his mouth.

“Daisy,” he greeted cautiously. 

“What time does May usually get here? 8:00? 8:30?”

“Something like that,” he agreed. “But she’s not coming in today.”

“What?”

Mack met her unwarranted incredulity with a raised eyebrow.

“She sent me a text after she got back last night,” he told her. “Said she was taking the day. Something about not feeling well.”

Daisy’s excited anxiety veered towards something akin to panic.

Was she avoiding her? 

It would not be the first time. May did not usually let a personal grudge get in the way of doing her job though. 

What if she had gone off and done something stupid last night? Like try to track down Not-Coulson by herself?

“Hey, Tremors,” Mack said. “What’s up with you?”

“Mack,” she said, taking a step towards him. “Do you have May’s address?”

He let out a breath and shook his head. 

“You know I can’t give that to you,” he said. “You know what May is like about her privacy.”

She knew. 

Gods, did she know. 

“This is important,” she insisted. “I… I might have some information about Coulson.”

That got his attention.

“About Coulson?” He repeated. “Is it something that can help us contain this situation with his double?”

“Maybe,” she hedged. “But, I really need to run it by her first.”

Mack’s eyes did not move from her face as he set his mug on the console and reached for his phone. Seconds after tapping something on his screen, Daisy felt the mobile in her pocket vibrate. 

“I did not give you that,” he said, gesticulating at her with the phone. “You hacked into some real estate database or something to get that information. We clear?”

Daisy flashed him a grateful smile. 

“We’re clear, boss.”

She pivoted on her heel and jogged for the exit. 

“Daisy?” He called after her. “Comms on standby in case we need you!”

“Yes, sir!” 

***

The house that matched the address that Mack had (not) given her was a two-story wooden structure with a small porch in the front and an adjoining garage. It was nothing fancy, but it was a lot bigger than Daisy would have expected. If you had to live on a government salary she supposed that there were worse places to do it than River’s End. 

Now that she was actually here, the energy that fueled her confidence faltered. 

Showing up unannounced at May’s home was not going to win her any points of gratitude. She was probably the last person she wanted to see right now. 

But her car was in the driveway, which meant that she had not driven off on some half-cocked vengeance spree last night. Now might be the only chance Daisy had to show her what she found. If they saw “Coulson” again before she could tell her, she might be too late. 

Daisy held her breath and pushed the doorbell. 

A full minute went by and there was no answer. 

She closed her eyes and pressed it again. Then one more time.

Why not? May could not get any angrier at her than she already was.

She reached for the doorbell a fourth time, fully prepared to hold it until May stormed out and throttled her, when the door flew open.

“Daisy, what?” May demanded. 

She looked like she had not slept. 

Her normally coiffed hair hung limply at her shoulders. Her face was bare of makeup and she was still wearing the oversized tee shirt and yoga pants that she had worn to bed.

Daisy did not care. They had both seen each other look a lot worse. As far as she was concerned, as long she had all of her appendages and was not bleeding out from major trauma, she was alright. 

Moreover, she was not mad. 

Daisy knew angry May. It was terrifying. 

She was just annoyed.

Annoyed May, she could work with. 

“I need to show you something,” she said in a rush. 

May huffed and looked back over her shoulder.

“Now is not a good time.”

“I know, but this is—

“Mama?”

_“Oh, shit,”_ Daisy cursed internally. 

Zoe. 

How could she have forgotten? Of course, she’d be home if May was taking the day off! She was not supposed to know about her! How the hell was she supposed to play this?

May closed her eyes as if in silent prayer. She did not spare Daisy a glance as she turned around to address the source of the interruption. 

“It’s okay, baobei,” she said softly.

A little girl wearing a Captain America shirt that fell past her knees wandered into the living room. The brown curls that framed her face were tangled and damp, and her forehead was coated in a thin sheen of sweat. 

“You need to be in bed,” May told her. “Mama’s just talking to—

“Daisy?” The girl asked, her eyes growing wide. 

As it turned out, Daisy did not have to feign astonishment after all. Any artifice of confusion she constructed at the presence of the little girl was replaced with genuine surprise when Zoe ran across the room and launched herself into her arms. Quick reflexes compelled her to catch the child and pick her up. She was rewarded with an explosion of wet, hacking coughs near her ear. 

“Cover your mouth, Zoe,” May muttered, studying the wall over Daisy’s shoulder. “We don’t want to get Daisy sick.”

"It’s okay,” Daisy whispered. “I don’t mind.”

Every thought of why she had come here was replaced with bewildered amazement. How did Zoe know her name? Why did she trust her so unreservedly? She did not get that trait from May.

She threaded her fingers through Zoe’s curls experimentally and marveled at how light she was in her arms. She was so tiny and warm. If she had asked her to hold her like this all day, she would have done it without a second thought.

She cradled her head, bringing it to rest on her shoulder. Coulson used to hug her like that, with one arm around her back and a protective hand at the back of her head. It was the safest she could ever remember feeling.

“Did you miss me?” Zoe mumbled into the fabric of her uniform. 

Daisy did not know what to say. 

If she had known about her, she would have missed her terribly. She knew that much with certainty. It was the strangest feeling, loving someone she had only just met. 

“Do you remember Daisy from your pictures, Zoe?” May prodded, saving Daisy from having to reply.

The girl nodded into her shoulder, then lifted up her head to examine her. Daisy tried to remain calm as Zoe studied her face. Suddenly, she was seized with an irrational fear that the girl would find something about her that did not live up to her expectations. Her frown of concentration was so reminiscent of Coulson’s that Daisy had to bite her lip to keep from gasping.

“Your hair is different,” she said at last. She brushed a blonde strand away from Daisy’s forehead so carefully that it was almost comical.

Daisy chuckled in relief. 

“Yeah,” she agreed. “I changed it. Do you like it?”

“Yes,” Zoe decided. “It’s very beautiful.”

Daisy’s response was drowned out by another barrage of coughs that Zoe tried to stifle with an open palm. 

“Zoe,” May broke in gently. “You really do need to get some rest.”

“Okay,” she agreed. “Can Daisy tuck me in?”

May could barely meet Daisy’s questioning glance. Her smile was tight and pleading, torn between embarrassment and gratitude. 

“Of course I can,” Daisy replied.

***

After she was sure that Zoe was sleeping soundly, Daisy crept across the carpet and eased the door to her room shut, only to nearly jump out of her skin at the sight of May standing in the hallway behind her. 

“Sorry,” May mouthed.

She would have waved away the apology, but May was still having trouble making eye-contact. 

Daisy swallowed. 

If it were anyone else, she would have said it was out of guilt. But May did not do awkward remorse. Did she? 

Damn. This was worse than angry.

“I—I didn’t mean to barge in…” Daisy tried to explain. “I should have told you I was coming over. I just didn’t think you’d want to see me.”

May nodded and Daisy followed her downstairs into the living room, where they could talk without fear of waking Zoe. 

“I planned to introduce you to her,” May said, looking over her crossed arms at the floor. “I wasn’t trying to keep her a secret. I just… I didn’t know where to start.”

“I get it,” Daisy assured her. “You’ve had a whole life in five years and to the rest of us it was only a few seconds. I get that all of that is not something you can explain in soundbites between missions.”

She glanced up the stairs to where the little girl slept. 

“She’s perfect, May,” she whispered.

That earned her a genuine smile. 

“Thank you,” May said. “She came down with a cold yesterday while we were in the field. I was up with her all night.” 

At the mention of pulling an all-nighter, Daisy was jerked out of the surreal domestic daydream she had wandered into and remembered why she had invaded May’s home to begin with. She reached into the bag that she had discarded at the doorway and pulled out a datapad.

“I came here because I found something that you need to see,” she said. “It’s about Coulson.”

May stared at her so long and hard, Daisy began to think she had spoken Pig-Latin instead of English.

When she finally answered, her words were spoken with measured deliberation.

“I know that you are trying to help, Daisy,” she told her. “But I need you to let this go.”

“I can’t,” Daisy insisted. “If you just—

“Do you think that any part of this has been easy for me?” May snapped, all contrition gone. “Do you have any idea how hard it was to pull a gun on—

She shot a frustrated glance up the stairs, realizing how loudly she had spoken. A shuttering sigh left her and seemed to take all of her strength with it. 

“I loved him more than anything,” she said quietly. “He was everything to me.”

The confession made Daisy’s heart hurt. It was nothing she did not already know. But she never thought she would hear her say the words out loud. 

“And I know he loved me,” she continued. “Zoe was… he adored her. But when it came down to it, it wasn’t enough. We weren’t enough. I hate that we weren’t enough, but I’ve accepted it.”

“How can you think that?” Daisy demanded. “May, you knew him better than anyone! How can you believe that he left you, left his _daughter_ …? What makes you think he gave up because getting me back was all he was living for?”

“Because he told me.”

If she had slapped her across the face, Daisy would not have been more shocked. Her legs lost their strength. They could not support her. She took a step back and sank into the couch.

‘“She’s safe now,’” May recited. “He said it again and again. Those last days, he was in and out of consciousness. Sometimes he wasn’t making any sense. But other than making me promise to let him go and make sure he never came back, that was all he would say.”

_“He didn’t mean that,”_ Daisy thought desperately. _“He was dying. He didn’t know what he was saying.”_

“You were safe and that was enough for him,” May said. “I wanted to believe there was more to it, but there isn’t. That’s just how it is.”

Daisy raised her head and met her eyes with fierce determination.

“No.”

“Excuse me?”

“There _is_ more to it than that,” she stated. “I can’t explain everything. I don’t know why…I don’t know what would make him say that. But Coulson did _not_ leave you because he wanted to.”

She turned on the datapad and opened the file that she had transferred from her laptop. Without waiting for protest or permission, she pulled up the video feed, pressed play, and handed the pad to May.

“What am I looking at?” She asked wearily.

“Just watch.”

Daisy watched her reaction without blinking, looking for some indication of recognition.

“Is this from Stark’s cabin?” May asked. 

“Yup,” she confirmed. “Fury got Happy to turn over all of Stark’s security footage to SHIELD a few months back. As far as I know, we’ve never done anything with it.”

“That’s us,” May realized. “It’s the night we went to convince him…”

Daisy jumped off the couch and squeezed in next to her. She had seen the footage enough times to have it memorized, but she did not want her to have to watch it alone.

On the screen, a security camera trained on the entrance to the cabin filmed Coulson and May approach. Coulson paused a few feet from the door and fished something out of his pocket. He pulled out a phone and turned to the side, apparently reading a text. When he was done, he looked up and said something to May. The angle of the camera did not offer a view of his face, but whatever he told her elicited a nod. She continued up to the cabin, while Coulson walked into the clearing, phone still in his hand. 

“He said he needed to make a call,” May remembered. “To Rhodie, I think.”

As soon as the cabin door shut behind the May in the footage, Coulson glanced over his shoulder and pocketed the phone. There was no sound on the recording, so they could not hear the words he said when he looked up and spoke to a figure just out of frame.

May brought the screen closer, searching for some clue as to who he was talking to. She did not have to wait long. 

A man came towards him and stopped just a few feet away. Even with his back to the camera and his face obscured by a dirty, grey hoodie, May knew who he was. 

“Reyes,” she hissed. “What the hell?”

The conversation between the two men lasted a couple of minutes, but between the camera angle and Robbie’s hood in the way, they could not have made out what they were saying even if they used lip-reading technology. Still, May’s eyes remained glued to the screen, trying to pick up anything from their silent conversation. 

Without warning, the Ghost Rider made his entrance.

Robbie’s neck twisted unnaturally. His hoodie fell off, revealing a face contorted in pain as his flesh smoked and burned away.

Coulson did not run or reach for his weapon.

He did not even flinch. 

Daisy and May watched him face the flaming monster in front of him passively, just for a moment, then the creature reached out and pressed a searing palm to his chest. He doubled over in agony.

The Rider was gone as quickly as he came. Robbie’s face replaced the fiery skull. Coulson was still bent over, grabbing his knees to steady himself, when Robbie closed the gap between them and placed a hand on his shoulder. Coulson’s shoulders moved up and down slowly, telegraphing every labored breath. 

When he was able to stand again, Robbie let his hand fall to his side. Something Coulson said made him smile sadly. With one last glance in Coulson’s direction, Robbie pulled up his hood and disappeared down the path where he had come. 

Coulson placed a hand on his chest and grimaced. Then, after buttoning up his jacket, he turned back to the cabin and let himself inside. 

Daisy turned off the datapad. 

There was nothing more to see. 

“He killed him,” May said, eyes still fixed on the darkened screen. 

Daisy nodded in grim agreement.

“You said that at the end, it was like five years never happened,” she reminded her gently. “Maybe it really was the same. Ghost Rider showed up to finish the job.”

“Tell me you’re tracking him,” May said. 

“Ran facial recognition through all of our databases as soon as I saw this,” she confirmed. “Got a hit on my way over here.”

“Where is he?”

“Looks like he’s gone back home,” she said. “Traffic cam picked him up in LA.”

“Good,” May nodded, her eyes darting about the room. “That’s good.”

“What do you want to do?”

May squared her shoulders and set her jaw, transforming as Daisy looked on. Only now did she realize how lost May had been since she returned. She wasn’t lost now. She was determined. And furious. If Daisy had ever forgotten what a formidable opponent she could be, the dark fire that burned in her eyes was all of the reminder she needed. 

“Give me five minutes,” May ordered. “Call ahead to the base and make sure there’s a quinjet fueled up and ready to lift.”

“I will, but aren’t you forgetting something?” Daisy prompted.

“What?”

“Zoe?” She asked. “We can’t exactly take her with us for a showdown with a vengeance demon.”

“I didn’t forget,” May said, reaching for her phone. “I have backup.”

“Backup?” Daisy repeated. “You mean a ‘babysitter?’ Who?”

“Someone I trust.”


	8. Chapter 8

“I can’t believe Mike Peterson is your babysitter,” Daisy exclaimed for the third time in the last hour. “How did you manage to rope him into that?” 

As before, May gave her no answer or even an indication that she had heard the question. She was clearly in what Daisy secretly thought of as “Full Cavalry Mode.” When she got like this, she became a silent and calculating instrument that was tuned to a single purpose. 

It was going to get her killed. 

Daisy filled the quiet with chatter, trying, unsuccessfully, to get May’s brain to switch gears. 

“Of course, I can’t think of a better choice,” she continued. “It’s not like you’d ever have to worry about her safety. And he was a great dad. Did Ace disappear with everyone else?”

May reached overhead and pulled the handle that deployed the quinjet’s landing gear.

“Hold on,” she commanded.

Daisy’s fingernails cut into her palms when she gripped her shoulder straps. It was not one of May’s smoother landings. 

As soon as they hit the concrete, May was off and running. 

Daisy stumbled out of the cockpit’s co-pilot chair after her. By the time she caught up to her, the senior agent was already a block away from the abandoned lot where they had parked the quinjet.

“May?” Daisy panted, jogging up beside her. “Can we take a beat here? You know you can’t kill Robbie. If you piss him off enough, you might get hurt.”

‘Hurt,’ would be the best case scenario if she brought out the Ghost Rider.

“Not before I get a few good hits in,” May replied, pivoting around a corner. 

The parking lot of the garage where Robbie worked was abandoned. Sunlight beat down mercilessly on asphalt and chrome, making the air around them warp like a desert mirage. The percussive banging of tools hitting steel indicated that there was at least one mechanic inside, working in the shade to escape the heat. 

It took a moment for Daisy’s eyes to adjust from the glaring sun to the gloom of the garage. She spotted Robbie just after May did. She set after him at a dead sprint, apparently intent on tackling him to the ground. 

Daisy was almost too late to stop her.

She raised her hand and saved him at the last second, by hurling him up against a far wall with a burst of tectonic energy. She paused long enough to throw Daisy a cauterizing glare, before turning her attention back to her intended prey. She closed in on the young man and grabbed him by the collar of his leather jacket. 

Robbie was irritatingly unsurprised by the turn of events. 

“Agent May,” he said, with a nod. “Been wondering when you’d show up.”

He cocked his head to the side to see around her.

“Hey Daisy,” he said. “Good to see you made it back in one piece.”

May tightened her hold on his jacket and banged his head against the wall to remind him that this was not a social visit.

“You. Killed. Him,” she snarled. 

He let out a long breath and dropped his head.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m surprised it took you this long to put it together. He told me not to say anything, but I knew it was only a matter of time before you figured it out.”

“What?” May barked. “What did he tell you not to say?”

Daisy was unnerved by his confused expression.

“You mean, you don’t know?” He asked them. “You don’t know why?”

“What do you mean ‘why?’” May asked. “That was the deal, wasn’t it? He gave his life when he took on the Rider. But it didn’t take. He found a way around it. You came to make sure he paid the price.”

Robbie’s eyes darted from Daisy to the seething woman in front of him, uncertainty written all over his face.

“There’s more to it than that,” he mumbled. 

May’s grip relaxed on his jacket and she took a small step back. 

“What do you mean?” Daisy asked. “What don’t we know, Robbie?”

“I promised him I wouldn’t say,” he replied, looking to May. “He didn’t want you to know.”

She crossed her arms in defiance. 

“He’s dead,” she said bluntly. “We’re not. Talk.”

Free of her grasp, Robbie rolled his shoulders and popped his neck to the side. He gauged both of the women standing in front of them, apparently evaluating his options. As the Rider, he could have probably taken them both and made a run for it, but it would have been a temporary reprieve. Robbie had had enough experience with them to know that they would keep coming for him until they had the answers that they wanted. 

“You’re right,” he said. “The Rider thought that Coulson reneged on the deal. He didn’t know— _I_ didn’t even know he was alive until the two of you showed up in that apartment back in Spain.”

“I knew coming there was a mistake,” May muttered. 

“Yeah,” Robbie agreed. “He was pissed. He didn’t know how or why Coulson was alive, and he didn’t care. You don’t go back on a deal with the Ghost Rider. If you do… he makes sure you pay for it.”

“And how did he want Coulson to pay?” May asked.

He clenched his hands and shuttered as he looked her in the eye. 

“By taking away everything he gained in the five years he had stolen.”

Oh no. 

_“She’s safe now.”_

Coulson was not talking about her when he was dying, Daisy realized. He was talking about—

Tools fell off their hooks and clanged to the floor. The studs in the walls vibrated from the impact of May hurling Robbie against the sheetrock. Her arm pressed against his throat so tightly that veins popped out at his temples and his face flushed red.

“You were going to kill our _daughter_?” She demanded.

“The _Ghost Rider_ was,” Robbie choked out. “Probably you too. I don’t know. He doesn’t always share the specifics with me. You think I wanted that?”

“So, what?” May asked. “You settled for killing him?”

“I came to _warn_ him,” he told her. “Why else would I have ridden across the Atlantic in the wheel well of your plane?”

He doubled over coughing violently when she dropped her arm. May stood over him, staring him down, even as he looked up at her beseechingly. 

“I told him to take you and the kid and disappear,” he explained. “Fall off the grid. Go some place where the Rider could never find her. But he thought… he knew that she’d never be safe. Not as long as he was alive.”

“So, he told you to kill him instead,” May realized. “He told you to burn through everything that was keeping him alive all over again.”

“He didn’t ‘tell’ me. He begged me,” Robbie said. “He swore that he didn’t have any more tricks up his sleeve. Promised not to come back. As long as the Rider left you and the girl alone.”

“And you didn’t hesitate to take him up on the offer.”

“He was already dead!” He insisted. “He was dead from the minute he made that deal.”

“Yeah,” May agreed. “You made sure of that, didn’t you?”

“It’s not me!” Robbie shouted. “I’m just the goddamned messenger!”

“It _is_ you,” she spat. “He beat you. He found a way out that deal and he made something good with the time he had left. And then you used his family as leverage to punish him for it.”

He slumped to the concrete, all defiance gone. Daisy almost pitied him. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

May turned away from him, disgust and loathing contorting her features.

Daisy was not done though. There was something else bothering her.

“The man who looks like Coulson?” She asked. “The guy who’s been at the scene of these attacks? You’ve seen him, haven’t you?”

He must have. There was no footage of the Coulson imposter in St. Louis, but the press had recordings of him exiting the truck in front of the museum. His face had been all over the news. Fortunately for Coulson’s reputation, no one in the media had connected the imposter to the SHIELD agent that was supposed to have died in the line of duty over a decade ago.

Not yet, at least. 

Robbie nodded. 

“So, why haven’t you gone after him?” Daisy asked. 

There was one logical explanation. She just did not want it to be true. 

“I don’t know, Daisy.”

She nodded and looked away, warm tears stinging her eyes. 

“It’s because it’s not him,” she said. “Is it? He’s not in there any more at all, is he?”

“Maybe not.”

Robbie got to his feet and stood inches from her. She could feel him fighting the impulse to reach out on comfort her. It was a good instinct. If he laid a finger on her right now, she would likely snap his arm in half. 

“I don’t always know what the Rider is thinking,” he said. “I don’t know all of the logic. If he hasn’t gone after him, maybe it’s because he thinks the debt is paid. Or maybe it’s because it’s not him. But, I don’t know, maybe you’ll find a way to bring him back again.”

Daisy just stared through him, all of her hope fading away.

“If you do find a way though, you can never let me find out about it,” Robbie told her. “I mean it. If anyone can find their way back, it’s him. But if he does, I can’t know. If I know, the Rider will know. And I don’t know what he’ll do.”

A hand fell on her bicep and squeezed gently. 

“Come on,” May said. “We got what we came for.”

Daisy looked over at her and saw the pain and resignation in her eyes. It ignited a spark in her gut that erupted in a burning rage. 

“No,” she growled, turning back to Robbie. “If we get him back, it won’t be so he can spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder waiting for you to come and take his family away. I know you, Robbie. You’re stronger than this. You aren’t helpless. You can control this thing.”

He sighed. 

“I don’t know if that’s true.”

“Maybe it’s because you’ve never had a reason before,” she said. “The Ghost Rider tracks down bad guys. You can make peace with that. Even SHIELD has looked the other way in the past. But you know, you _know_ , that this is wrong. Killing a child? Destroying the family of a good man? That’s not vengeance. It’s murder.”

Robbie nodded.

“I know.”

“Good,” she said. “Then get a leash on that thing inside of you. Because if you don’t, if you ever come near May, Coulson, or that little girl, Ghost Rider or not, I will send you both straight to hell myself.”

His eyes darted along the contours of her face, searching her. For what, she did not know. If he was looking for insincerity or weakness, he would not find it. She was not leaving until he knew damn well who he was dealing with.

“Do you understand?” She asked.

“Yeah,” he said, at last. “I understand, Daisy.”

***

The flight home was just as quiet as their outward journey, but Daisy did not feel the need to fill the silence. The tension was gone. They both needed time to process the weight of what they had learned. 

All of their questions had been answered. 

The only mystery left to solve was behind the familiar eyes of their former director. And now, Daisy did not know if she wanted to find out the truth. While he was out of their reach, there was hope that Coulson was still in there. What would she do if they caught him and found that he was gone for good?

“You were right.”

“I’m sorry?” Daisy asked. 

“I should have seen it myself,” May said, with a rueful smile. “I knew something was off with him that night, but I didn’t press it. After he was gone, I was angry. Hurt. I let myself believe the worst.”

“Well, it’s not like he made it easy for you,” Daisy said. “Besides, you weren’t all wrong. Your said it yourself: he’s a protector above everything else. It just wasn’t me and the rest of the team he was saving.”

“It wasn’t him that made me think that,” she admitted. “Not really. It wasn’t anything he said or did. It was me. I never really believed that he could… feel what I felt. I never really thought…”

“What?” 

“That I was good enough for him,” she whispered.

Daisy did not know what surprised her more, that Melinda May would disclose something that personal to her, or how insane that particular sentiment was.

“Wow. I guess all those sappy songs are right,” she said. “Love really does make you crazy.”

May cut her eyes at her, but Daisy was undeterred.

“May, Coulson tore a path across the globe looking for you he found out Radcliffe replaced you with that LMD. I don’t think he slept for two weeks. That summer you went off with Andrew? He was a basket-case. If I had a dollar for every time I found him trying to track you down ‘just to make sure’ your were safe… well, I’d still be broke, because inflation sucks and a dollar is worth practically nothing, but you get what I’m saying.”

“Which is?”

“He was crazy about you,” she asserted. “Everything you felt for him, he felt for you and more. If the two of you weren’t so damn closed off all of the time, you’d know that.” 

“We weren’t always closed off.”

“Well, obviously,” Daisy said. “I didn’t think a stork dropped Zoe on your doorstep.”

May smiled at that. 

“You know what this means though, right?” Daisy asked. “He only made you promise all of that stuff so that Ghost Rider wouldn’t hurt Zoe. He didn’t want to leave you guys.”

“I know,” she said. “I know that now.”

“I won’t let Robbie hurt her, May.”

“I know,” May repeated. “But whatever is in his body now, it’s not Coulson. It’s not just his memories that are gone. It’s almost as if there’s some person or thing living inside of him.”

“Do you think there’s a chance he’s still in there?” She asked apprehensively. 

“If he is, he’s buried deep,” May admitted. “But, if he is in there at all, if there’s a chance that he can get him back…”

“We take it,” she concluded. 

May nodded in agreement, wearing a ghost of a smile.

They were on the same side again. May had her back. Everything that that kept her wired and on edge was falling back into place. 

Daisy slumped back into the seat in relief, feeling every lost minute of sleep.

May grounded her like no one else. The world could be against them and she could stand firm, as long as she was beside her. 

“…sy? Did you hear me?”

She blinked and sat up, wondering when she had dozed off. 

“What’s up?” She asked, groggily. 

“I can’t get anyone on comms. Try on your end.”

Daisy sat at attention and pressed her hand to her ear. 

“Mack, this is Daisy. We are…”

She glanced at the readout of the flight path. 

“Two minutes out,” she concluded. “Requesting opening of docking-bay hatch.”

There was nothing on the other end of her comm. Not even static. Communications were down. There was no point in repeating herself.

“Comms have been cut,” Daisy announced. 

“They must not have seen this coming or they would have called us back to the base,” May said.

“Or…”

Daisy wrestled her phone out of her pocket and immediately cursed herself for turning it to silent. There were three missed calls and one text message from Mack:

_“River’s End under attack. Imposter and crew at Town Hall. Comms down. All SHIELD personnel on site. May and Daisy, where the hell are you??”_

The text was sent less than half an hour ago.

“Oh no,” May muttered. 

Daisy looked up and saw the destruction that greeted them. Three blocks of downtown River’s End had been leveled. Far below on the ground, firetrucks and police cars were evacuating civilians, some on foot, some on stretchers. 

Closing in on the wreckage of Town Hall in a semi-circle were the miniature figures of their team. Every member of SHIELD who was not currently in the field or in deep space had converged on the site. 

Her heart dropped to her stomach. 

“They’re going to kill him,” she whispered. 

“Or,” May said. “He has them right where he wants them. He could take down all of SHIELD in one blow.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the kudos you guys! I love reading your comments. Keep them coming! :-)
> 
> Next up: Show down with Sarge and the truth of his identity.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a couple more chapters left! Let me know what you guys think of this so far!

Reaching Mack and the tactical assault team in the remains of downtown River’s End meant stumbling through a debris field three blocks across. It was slowing them down. Every second that they lost meant that the window of opportunity to save their team and Coulson came closer to slamming shut. 

“I’m sure Zoe’s safe,” Daisy called out. 

May did not turn around or slow her pace. 

“I mean, your house is pretty far from here…” she trailed off. 

Daisy could not have been less convincing in her assurance. 

“She’s fine,” May shouted back. “Mike got her out of town the second the building blew.”

Mike’s was one of the multiple calls she had missed during their encounter with Reyes. She did not have a chance to reply, but was not worried. Mike Peterson understood the demands of her job all too well. He had proven himself as a loyal friend and protector multiple times over the last few years. Even after Ace returned, he showed no interest in rejoining SHIELD. 

It was a shame. They could have used his help right now. 

On the other hand, there was no one she trusted more with her daughter’s safety. 

“I guess you were right,” Daisy said, coming up behind her. “‘Backup’ is more appropriate than ‘babysitter.’”

May gave her a brief smile before putting on her game face. 

“You ready?” She asked her.

Daisy nodded and fell into step with her as they crossed the barricade. 

Mack was too busy fielding interrogation from the local EMTs and fire department to notice them at first. When he did finally see them, his eyes did not leave their faces as he finished answering questions and handing out orders. Years of training prevented May from recoiling at the fury in his gait as he approached them. She could not begrudge him his anger. Not responding in a time of crisis was tantamount to going AWOL.

“Where the hell have you two been?” he seethed. “You see this? It’s chaos out here! We needed your help.”

“We’re here now,” May told him. 

The scolding could wait. The clock was ticking. 

“We were following up that lead I told you about,” Daisy added. 

“Yeah?” He asked. “You find anything that can help us out of this mess?”

May glanced at Daisy out of the corner of her eye. A quiet understanding passed between them. Both women shook their heads. 

“Great.”

“What’s the situation?” May asked. 

Mack sighed. 

“Our comms were cut,” he said. “Sat feed too. We only knew what was happening when one of the security cameras at the gate caught the blast.”

Daisy nodded with a frown. 

“This was meant for SHIELD,” she said. “They knew they couldn’t take the Lighthouse, so they attacked the town to draw us out.”

“Yeah, well, it worked,” Mack said. “I ordered all units out to help with evac and rescue. We can’t ignore that many injured and dead civilians on our doorstep. And we can’t make a coordinated tactical assault without communications.”

“You made the right call,” May assured him. “You have eyes on the target yet?”

Mack shook his head, watching agents herd the last of the bystanders behind the barricades. 

“Been too busy with search and rescue,” he said. “The assault team is holding their position around Town Hall to make sure no one tries to make a run for it. But as soon as—

He looked up, spotting someone in the crowd.

“Yo-Yo!” He shouted. 

The agent looked up from a civilian who was wounded on a stretcher and jogged over.

“We need eyes on the inside,” he said. “Just to get a lay of the land. You up for some quick recon?”

“You got it, boss,” Yo-Yo agreed. 

May blinked, trying to clear her vision enough to track the Inhuman’s movements. She may have sped off and come back as many as four times in the space between one breath and the next. The only indication of her comings and goings was the telltale rush of air she left behind. 

She came to halt in front of them wearing a grim expression.

“Four bad guys on the side, including that Coulson _remalparido_ ,” she reported. “Guys, the site in St. Louis? You said it looked like a little oil rig?” 

“Something like that, yeah,” Daisy replied. 

“I think it’s a bomb,” she said. “It’s covered in wiring and there are cans of explosives at the bottom.”

“What the scaffolding for then?” May asked.

“If it’s an energy weapon, it could be to funnel the blast,” Mack speculated. “To make the explosion go further.”

“Okay,” Daisy sighed. “Did you see a timer?”

“No timer,” Yo-Yo said. “It’s controlled by a switch on a remote. Guess who has it?”

May should not have been surprised, but it did not stop her blood from freezing in her veins. Her extremities went numb. She opened and closed her hands to assure herself that they were still there.

“Could you tell if it was a dead man’s switch?” Mack asked quietly.

Yo-Yo shook her head. 

“His finger was not on the button,” she explained. “He has to press it for the bomb to go off.”

It made sense. 

Whoever, _whatever_ , was inside of Coulson’s body, it had a healthy sense of self-preservation. She was betting there would be a lag between the activation of the bomb and its detonation. Just enough time for him and his teammates to transmit themselves clear of the blast. 

“Okay,” Mack decided. “We’ve got to take him out.”

“No!” Daisy interjected. 

All eyes turned to her. May hoped she had a good alternative suggestion, because at the moment, she could not think of a more viable plan. 

“Sorry, Director,” she said. “But we need to evacuate the civilians. Get them far away from here.”

“We don’t know how far that explosion will reach,” Yo-Yo countered. “For all we know, it could blow up half the state.”

“Then we get them to the Lighthouse,” May said. “That thing was built to survive the apocalypse. They’ll be safe there.”

Seeing his uncertainty, she took a step closer. 

“Mack, he wants to eliminate SHIELD,” she reminded him. “Having all of our people in one place is putting these civilians’ lives in jeopardy. We need to get as many people as we can to the Lighthouse, now.”

He nodded. 

“Alright,” he said. “But we’ve still got to take out the target, Melinda.”

May held Daisy’s gaze for a long second, silently ordering her to follow her lead.

“We’ll take care of it, sir,” she said. 

Daisy nodded in agreement. 

“Alright,” he said. “Be safe.”

He stepped away from their huddle to address every SHIELD agent within shouting distance.

“Let’s move out, people!” He ordered. “I want you to get every civilian you can find into the Lighthouse! Tactical assault team…”

“I’m coming with you,” Yo-Yo announced, turning to Daisy and May. 

“Yo-Yo—

“You need all the help you can get,” she said, silencing Daisy’s protests. 

“We do,” May agreed. “Come on. We need to move fast.”

***

The initial blast had blown out a nonloadbearing wall in the back of the Town Hall. May, Daisy, and Yo-Yo approached the yawning opening covertly, only to discover that the precaution was unnecessary. There was no one guarding the makeshift entrance. 

“You’d think they would have learned after last time,” Daisy muttered. 

“These guys don’t strike me as big thinkers,” Yo-Yo observed. 

May peered around the crumbling edifice, but an interior wall blocked her view of the interlopers. 

“Okay,” she said. “When we get in, Daisy, you take out their transmitters so they can’t beam themselves out of here.”

Daisy nodded. 

“I don’t think these guys are on a suicide mission,” May said. “They won’t want to blow the place if they can’t get out. But we can’t take the risk that one of them presses that button once they are under attack. We’ve got to move fast.”

“Not a problem,” Yo-Yo said. 

May smiled faintly. 

“What about… you know…” Daisy trailed off. 

“Leave him to me,” May said.

She entered the building first, holding her weapon in front of her. Daylight streamed in through broken window panes and the pockmarked holes in the walls. Visibility would not be a problem this time.

After taking a few paces forward, she realized she had no idea where she was going. She turned back to Yo-Yo, who jerked her head to the left. May followed her down the east side of the building with Daisy on her heels. 

Looking through one of the shattered windows, May saw that Mack had ordered half of the tactical response team to stay behind. Six SHIELD agents stood in textbook attack formation in front of the main entrance, ready to fire if any hostile took a step outside. 

Yo-Yo must have seen them too.

“Why hasn’t he activated the bomb?” She hissed over her shoulder. “Our people are leaving and the only ones left are right outside. He’s losing his chance.”

May did not have an answer for her. She was just glad to see that the evacuation had gone smoothly. 

Perhaps a little too smoothly.

She watched as a local news van crossed the now unguarded barrier and parked on the other side of the street. The tactical team did not break their formation as a reporter climbed out of the front seat and a camera operator set up his equipment to get a shot of the destruction.

“Idiots,” she muttered. 

“We’ve got to speed this up,” Daisy prodded. 

A left turn brought them to the former atrium at the center of the building. The explosion had taken the dome off the roof. Sunlight streamed in, offering them an unobstructed view of the fully assembled energy tower, complete with four barrels of explosives wired to a central control panel. 

May counted three hostiles. The Coulson imposter was nowhere in sight. 

Shit. 

Daisy glanced at her, waiting for the go-ahead. 

If he heard them attack, he would set off the bomb and jump out of here before they could stop him. But they could not leave three enemy combatants with live explosives to search for him.

May gestured to the side and the others shrank back behind a crumbling wall. 

“Wait thirty seconds,” she told them. “Then go in, quake the transmitters, and take them out.”

“What are you—

“I’m going to find him,” she said. 

“I can do it faster,” Yo-Yo protested. 

“No,” May said firmly. “I’ll find him.”

Yo-Yo glared at her in defiance, but she knew by now that arguing her about Phil Coulson was a lost cause. She would do as she was ordered. 

“Just give me thirty seconds,” May repeated. 

Without another word, she was off and running.

The majority of the Town Hall building was taken up by the atrium at the center. The blast had blown out windows and toppled walls, but it was not nearly as much of a maze as the wreckage in St. Louis. Even so, if Coulson’s doppelganger was hiding amongst the rubble, she had no chance of finding him in time to stop him from levelling the place. 

21, 20, 19, 18…

The rest of the east side of the building was clear. 

May took a sharp left and vaulted over a fallen column.

13, 12, 11…

She neared the front of the building. The hallway that stretched to the west side was vacant but for a spray of glass and marble. 

Her eyes focused on the long entryway that led to the opening where the front doors used to stand. 

8, 7, 6…

With her back against the wall, she turned the corner with her gun drawn. The perspective down the hall afforded her a full view of the SHIELD tactical team positioned just outside, all weapons pointing in her direction. But the angle of the sun only allowed a few feet of light to creep into the entryway. They could not see her. 

Something leaning against the wall in front of her obstructed her view. She could not tell if it was a statue, a chunk of debris, or—

Three pops shattered the silence behind her. The attack in the atrium reverberated off of marble and brick, echoing through the building. 

The shadow against the wall jerked. 

“Freeze!” May ordered.

Even with the light behind him, she knew it was him when he turned to face her. 

In one hand, he held the remote detonator. In the other, the metallic box that was his ticket out of here. 

The man grinned in a way that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. Coulson had never looked at her like that. She was less sure than ever that there was even a trace of the man she loved behind that mask. 

“Why are you doing this?” He asked, lifting his chin to indicate her raised weapon. “We both know you’re not going to use that.”

“And you’re not going to blow this place without an escape plan,” she shot back.

As if on cue, the box in his hand began to vibrate. He stared in helpless frustration as the mechanism shook apart and fell in pieces at his feet. 

“Nice timing,” May remarked, as Daisy joined her at her side. 

The imposter looked from the shattered transmitter to the device in his hand. 

“There’s no way out of here now,” May said. “You don’t want to do this. You don’t want to die.”

When he met her eyes, she thought she spied a trace of something familiar. Something hurt. It was gone before she could determine whether or not she had imagined it.

“You have no idea what I want,” the man told her. 

He took a step back, making his way for the door. 

“What are you doing?” Daisy yelled. 

The assault team would blow him to bits the moment he was in their sights. 

May felt a presence approach to her right. The barrel of a gun loomed in her peripheral vision. It was pointed straight at him. 

“No!”

She knocked the gun upward and a shot rang out. Plaster rained down on them when the bullet hit the tiled ceiling. 

May locked eyes with a furious Elena Rodriguez. 

“Stop!” Daisy cried. 

The three agents watched as the man turned on his heel and darted towards the light at the end of the hallway. 

An explosion of bullets rang out the second he walked outside. 

May tackled Daisy and held her head to her chest, shielding her from the onslaught. The firefight was deafening, but seconds ticked by and nothing hit her. She chanced a look over her shoulder. 

The imposter was still standing in the doorway, under assault, but unharmed. 

His face was bathed in the blue glow of the holoshield of Coulson’s prosthetic arm. 

That son-of-a-bitch!

How dare he?

Her grip on Daisy slackened as she began to realize the severity of the situation. He would not be able to hold them off forever. 

What the hell was he doing? 

He was going to get himself killed.

May’s eyes darted from the imposter to Yo-Yo to Daisy and back again. 

“Yo-Yo!” Daisy cried out. “You’ve got to stop them!”

“Are you insane?” She yelled. “The minute they stop shooting, he’ll blow us all to hell!”

In spite of the barrage of gunfire outside, the world had gone silent in May’s head. She only had one shot at this. 

It was all she had left. 

“Elena,” May whispered. “Please. I’ll stop him. No one else has to die. Just get their weapons. I’ll do the rest.”

Yo-Yo closed her eyes. 

_“Madre de Dios!”_

A rush of wind hit May’s face and the gunfire stopped. 

“You’d better be right about this,” Yo-Yo warned her.

Outside, the imposter deactivated his shield and turned in the direction of the news van. He stared into the camera, just as he was instructed. He moved raised the detonator slowly, making certain that every gesture was being captured. His finger touched the red button and he closed his eyes. 

A click echoed in his right ear. He knew that sound all too well: the safety of a gun switching off. 

He did not need to look to know who held the weapon. 

“And here I thought you were trying to protect me,” he muttered ironically. 

He opened his eyes, searching for a semblance of hope. The woman with the sad eyes stared back, but offered him no solace. 

“It’s not you I’m protecting.”

It was the last thing he heard before the world went dark. 


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for extreme angst and torture.

“…for much longer…”

“…better… some usable intel…lives lost…”

“…find out what he is. How did he get into Coulson’s body?”

This was the worst hangover of all time. And he had had some doozies. 

Sarge’s head felt like it was going to split open. 

Why wasn’t he dead? That woman had a direct shot. It felt like she had blown off his skull and somehow left his brain intact. 

“He’s waking up.”

Sarge opened his eyes a crack and immediately clamped them shut again. The overhead light in this place was searing. 

It was not just his head. Everything hurt. 

Something cold and hard pressed into the left side of his face. A table. He was leaning against a table. When he tried to move his legs and arms, sharp pain bit into his wrist and ankles, pinning him in place. 

He was in shackles. 

Great. 

He could not recall another time he had botched a mission so fantastically. 

There would be no going back now. 

Even if he got out of here, he was a dead man.

“Hey,” a deep voice said. “Quit faking. Get up.”

Sarge winced into the florescent light and sized up the man towering over him. He realized that his position slumped over a table made the man seem larger than he actually was, but not by much. He looked like he could crush his head with one of his biceps. 

Gods, why didn’t that woman just let him die?

“ICERs leave you with a hell of a headache,” the man informed him. “It’ll wear off in a couple of hours.”

“If we let you live that long,” a voice on the other side of the table added.

Sarge whipped his head in the direction of the speaker and immediately wished he hadn’t. A stabbing pain shot up the tight muscles in his neck. When his vision cleared, he saw a woman with long braids that fell past her shoulders. Where her shirt sleeves ended, metal prosthetic arms began. There was no telling what kind of damage she could do with those things. 

Being crushed by the giant’s biceps was starting to look like the preferable option. 

“Where—

Sarge broke off with a dry cough and swallowed. 

“Where’s the other one?” He asked. “The woman who shot me?”

“You’re not talking to her,” the man answered, his jaw clenched. “You’re never going near her again. Do you understand?”

“Who is she?” Sarge persisted. 

He had nothing to lose. If he was going down, he could at least know why she had gone to such lengths to bring him in alive. 

“Forget about her,” the woman snapped. “You should be worried about yourself.”

She sat down in the chair across from him and interlaced her metal fingers. 

“You’ve killed over a dozen people in the last week,” she said. “Injured about a hundred more. You know what SHIELD does to people like you?”

_“Shield, shield, shield…”_

The name popped up wherever he went. He still had no idea why.

“What the hell is ‘shield?’” He asked wearily. 

The man and woman exchanged a look over his head. 

“ _We_ are,” the man said. “Our organization is the last line of defense against bastards like you.”

Sarge straightened up in his chair and rolled his shoulders. 

“Well, congratulations, I guess,” he said. “You got me. What comes next?”

The woman spared another glance at the man looming over his shoulder. His nonchalance apparently unnerved them.

“That depends on how forthcoming you are,” the man said. 

Huh. 

He was screwed then. 

Dying by their hands would still be more merciful than the punishment that awaited him if he told them anything. Not that it mattered at this point. 

He had failed. 

There would be no extraction for him. No payment. 

If his employer got him out of this prison, it would only be so he could express the enormity of his disappointment. Sarge had seen his employer disappointed before. He would rather rot in here than be on the receiving end of his displeasure.

“What are you?” The woman demanded.

_“What?” ___

__

__

Now that was just offensive. 

Sarge frowned at her. 

“I’m a mercenary.”

“So, this wasn’t your op?” The man asked. 

He did not reply. 

It was his op in the sense that he was going to get the full blame that it went south. 

“I’m going to take that as a ‘no,’” the man continued. “You didn’t even know what you were targeting did you?”

No response. 

“You didn’t know that your M.O. or the last location you attacked were specifically designed to draw out SHIELD?”

“You guys are pretty narcissistic,” Sarge said. “Not everything is about you.”

“Then what is it about? Or who?” The woman asked. “Is this about Coulson? Is that why you took his body?”

He had just about had enough of this ‘taking body’ crap. It wasn’t ‘taking’ anything if no one was using it. 

“Look, I don’t know who ‘Coulson’ is and I don’t care,” he snapped. “The man paid me for a job. He tells me this is the body I have to use, that’s fine by me. Normally, the buyer isn’t so particular, but it’s not unheard of. I go where I’m told, I do what I’m told, I get paid. That’s it. It’s nothing personal.”

The man leaned in so close, Sarge bit the inside of his cheek so as not to flinch or look away. 

“You made it personal,” he growled. “This body does not belong to you. It belonged to a good man. It took the people here a long time to make peace with his death. Then _you_ show up and gave them false hope. You made them grieve all over again.”

It should not have bothered him. It was not his fault. He could not help who he was or what he needed to do to exist. But he still hated it. 

“Not only that, you’ve tarnished his legacy.”

Sarge looked up. 

“What’s that?” He asked.

“You showed up on the news looking like _him_!” The woman shouted. “A man who devoted his life to protecting others! Now all the press can talk about is how Phil Coulson is a terrorist!”

He let out a breath and eased back against the chair’s metal frame. 

There might be hope for him yet. 

But not if he kept talking. He had said too much already.

Hours passed in that cold, grey room. 

The man and woman took their turns yelling at him, threatening him, offering him lesser punishments, and reasoning with him. 

But Sarge did not say one more word. 

***

May felt as tired as Mack and Yo-Yo looked when they called it quits on their interrogation and joined she and Daisy on the other side of the two-way mirror. 

“We’re not going to get anything else out of him,” Mack said, rubbing his neck with his hand. 

“No,” Daisy agreed. “He shut down pretty quick after he found out that his Coulson impersonation went viral.”

“How are we doing with containing that?” May asked Mack.

He grimaced.

“I’ve spoken with President Ellis and briefed him on the situation,” he said. “He’s not happy, but seemed satisfied once I told him that we have the real perpetrator in custody. He knows it wasn’t Coulson, but I don’t know how we’re going to convince anyone else of that. His performance at Town Hall was close-up and high def.”

“We can’t let him drag Coulson’s name through the mud,” Yo-Yo insisted with a scowl. “We could tell them it was an LMD.”

“Last time we did that, the DOD put out arrest warrants on all of us for treason,” May reminded her.

“That’s not going to happen again,” Mack said. “The camera caught SHIELD tactical support facing off against him. They saw May take him down. It’s obvious that his actions weren’t sanctioned by us.”

“It doesn’t get Coulson off the hook though,” Daisy pointed out. 

“I’ll think of something to tell the press,” Mack said. “He worked too long and hard to make SHIELD what it is today. We’re not letting him go down for what this guy did.”

They fell silent and stared through the glass at the man with varying degrees of loathing. 

“That was the whole point, wasn’t it?” Daisy asked. “He wasn’t after us at all. He just wanted to ruin Coulson’s legacy.”

“I think this man, or whatever he is, just wanted to get paid,” Yo-Yo said. 

“But who hired him?” Daisy asked. 

“Who hated Coulson enough to want to kill his reputation, even after he was dead?” Mack asked rhetorically. 

May pressed her lips together in a grimace. 

“It’s not a short list,” she said. 

“Well,” Yo-Yo hedged. “There is one way we could get him to talk.”

Mack hung his head and sighed. 

“Maybe if Fitz or Simmons were here,” he said. “But no one else knows how to operate it.”

“You do!” Yo-Yo insisted. “You’re the one who put it back together!”

“Wait,” Daisy broke in. “Are you guys talking about the memory machine?”

Mack nodded reluctantly. 

“It’s too dangerous,” he said. “We’ve all seen what that thing can do to a person. And we don’t even know if that thing sitting in there is a person.”

“It’s our best option,” Yo-Yo said. “We don’t know if this is over just because we’ve caught the guy. He’s just a gun-for-hire. There could be more! That means more lives in danger.”

“Yeah, but if he’s just a merc, then he’s not going to know anything about his boss’s grand plan,” Daisy countered. 

“He knows more than he is saying,” Yo-Yo said.

“May?” Mack asked. “You’ve been quiet…er. What do you think?”

She looked past them to the man shackled to the table on the other side of the glass. Everything about him was all wrong, his posture, the way he held his arms in his lap, the blank stare in his eyes. Nothing about him radiated the clever confidence that Phil Coulson possessed. 

But somehow, it was still him. 

She still felt him. 

If he was really gone, why did she feel like he was right there?

“Do it,” she said, at last. 

Daisy looked at her, aghast. Mack shook his head and Yo-Yo allowed herself a small smirk of victory. 

“He might remember more about his employer than he thinks,” May said. “Any detail could lead us to him.”

“Alright,” Mack agreed reluctantly. “But I still think this falls under ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’”

“Everything about this is cruel and unusual, Mack,” Yo-Yo said.

“I’ll fire up the machine,” he said. “Yo-Yo? Grab one of the medical personnel, someone discrete. Have them on hand in case something goes wrong.”

Yo-Yo nodded and followed him into the hallway.

Once they were alone, Daisy rounded on May. 

“How can you be okay with this?” She asked. “You’ve seen what that thing has done to him before! It could kill him.”

“I’m not okay with this,” May intoned flatly. “I know it could kill him.”

“Then why—

“It could also be our only way of bringing him back,” she said. 

Daisy’s shoulders slumped, defeated. 

“If he’s in there at all, the memory machine could show him underneath whatever it is that has taken control of him,” May explained. “If he’s not…”

“Then, at least you’ve kept your promise,” Daisy said. 

Perhaps she did not mean it to be cruel, but she did not try to hide her disappointment either. It hurt, but May understood. 

If this did not work, whatever Daisy thought of her would be nothing compared to the loathing she would harbor towards herself. 

***

“We ready to go?”

Yo-Yo, Mack, Daisy, May, and nervous medical technician stood in a semi-circle around a surgical table to which the memory machine’s visor had been attached. The figure strapped to the table did not look particularly worried, just curious. 

If it really were Coulson, every muscle would be seizing up from combating the terror of what he knew was coming.

The realization did not offer May any comfort. 

“May?”

She tore her eyes away from the man on the table and blinked up at Mack. 

“Is there anything else you need to be taking care of?” He asked, offering her an out. 

“No, sir,” she said firmly. 

“Okay,” he replied.

The skepticism in his tone was loud and clear. 

Probably, he was calculating how much emotional damage control he would need to do once this was all over. She wished she could give him an answer, but she had never been less sure of anything in her life. 

“When we turn this machine on, we’re going to ask you some questions,” he told the imposter. “The sooner you answer, the sooner this ends. I suggest you don’t fight it. It’ll only make it worse.”

The first signs of worry creased the lines that framed the man’s eyes. He looked away from Mack to the other occupants of the room, finally settling on her. 

“Are you okay with them doing this?” He asked.

May willed herself to remain impassive. 

“We tried the easy way,” she replied. “We gave you an out. You brought this on yourself.”

As Mack spooled up the machine, she could feel Daisy clench up beside her. Once the imposter was preoccupied with the blue glow of the visor growing brighter above his head, May reached down and clasped her hand. 

_“Forgive me,”_ she pleaded silently. 

After a few tense seconds, Daisy gave her hand a squeeze. When the screaming started, her grip almost broke May’s knuckles. 

“Don’t fight it!” Yo-Yo instructed the man trashing on the table. “Just answer our questions and we’ll turn in off.”

“What?” He exclaimed. “What do…? Ask me! What?”

“Who hired you?” Mack asked. 

“I don’t know!” He yelled.

“Come on,” Mack insisted. “You have to know something. Did you meet him?”

“Yes!” The man said. “But I never knew his name! He never said. He… he killed anyone who asked!”

“What did he look like?” Yo-Yo asked. 

“Terran,” the man replied. “From Earth. Tall, dark hair… military or something… Agh! Turn it off!”

“Not yet,” Mack said. 

Tears leaked out of the corners of his eyes. He clamped them shut, trying to escape the light that made every synapse in his brain spark and smolder. It would not help.

“He k—killed one…one of my team,” the imposter choked out. “Lifted him in the air with his hand. He just _looked_ at him and…he crushed him from the inside out!”

May dropped Daisy’s hand. Her heart pounded in her throat. 

There was only one person that she could think of who fit that description. And he had demonstrated no compunction with inflicting collateral damage if it meant getting what he wanted.

She closed in and leaned over the man, stopping inches from his face. 

“Talbot,” she said. “Glenn Talbot. Was that his name?”

Her teammates murmured their disbelief behind her back.

“How is that possible?” Daisy asked.

The man’s teeth clenched until every muscle along his jaw showed through his flesh.

“Answer me!” May demanded. 

“Maybe. I don’t know!” He screamed. “I swear! I just… I overheard something…”

“What?” She asked.

“The guy… the body they wanted me to…please! Please turn it off! I’ll tell you!”

“What _about_ this body?” May pressed. “Why did Talbot want it?”

The man opened his eyes to reveal blood-shot corneas. They pleaded with her, begged her to stop. 

She could not do it. No matter how much she wanted to. She had to know. 

“Just tell me why,” she said. 

“He—he _hated_ him!” He yelled. “Furious he was dead. Said he d—died before he could make him pay... hired me to kill the memory...his legacy… He said… he said he wanted him to see everyone he loved turn against him. Said it was revenge for…for what he did…abandoning him…letting him turn into…into…”

He was fading, losing control. His eyes rolled up in his head and his limbs began to spasm. 

“May, we should shut it off,” Mack broke in. “We’re going to lose him.”

But she was not done. There was something he had said that caught her attention.

“How could he see?” May asked him. “How could Coulson see what was happening?”

Blue eyes widened and looked at her, through her, darting away. 

“Is he alive?” She pressed. “Is Coulson still there?”

“The buyer!” The man moaned. “He’ll kill me for talking!” 

His face twisted in torment. His muscles contracted violently, bending his back in a perfect bow, leaving only his shoulders and hips touching the table.

“Kill me!” He begged. “Kill me! Please. Please let me die!”

_“No. No! No no nonono!”_

May had been shot, knifed, perforated with a lead pipe, and beaten until she could not move without screaming. She would have repeated the agony from all of those experiences without complaint if it meant never having to hear him say those words again. 

“Turn it off!” She yelled.

Yo-Yo was in position, waiting for the command. She hit the failsafe switch before the words had finished leaving May’s mouth. 

The blue light from the visor faded, but the man continued to scream, locked in the cycle that the machine had started. 

“Please! Kill me!”

“What’s wrong with him?” Yo-Yo asked.

“He’s still under,” Daisy cried. 

“How do we snap him out of it?”

May reached down and rested a hand on his forehead.

“It’s okay! It’s over now,” she told him. “Stay with me.”

His eyes shot open. Pupils the size of pinpoints widened, searching her face.

“May?” He whispered hoarsely. 

“Phi—

His body began to seize uncontrollably. An unearthly howl tore through his throat. 

“Hold him still,” the medical tech ordered. 

“May!” He screamed. “I’m sorry! Please! Save me! I’M SORRY! I’M SORRY! MELINDA! SAVE ME, PLEASE!”

She tore the restraints off of his wrists and held his hands together in her own. It was the only thing that stopped her from falling to the floor when her knees buckled.

“Do something!” She begged. 

“I gave him a sedative,” the tech said. “It should be working!”

It was working, slowly. 

His screamed pleas quieted to whispers. The tension melted from his face. His legs jerked spasmodically once more before his body went limp. May looked up to see his head fall to the side, eyes closed. 

He was silent.

“May?” Daisy asked. “May, is he okay?”

She did not know. 

His chest still rose and fell beneath her, but he was otherwise unresponsive. 

“BP is stabilizing,” the tech reported, watching the heart monitor. “Agent May?”

“May,” Mack called out, commanding her attention. “Let her check on him.”

She released her hold on Coulson’s hands and watched them fall to his sides. Her legs nearly collapsed beneath her when she stood on them with her full weight. Only with Daisy half-carrying her away from the table was she able to walk at all. 

The medical tech’s examination may have taken seconds or hours. 

She did not see her shine the penlight into his eyes. She only saw his desperation when he recognized her again. She did not hear the tech call out to him. The only sound in her head was him screaming her name. 

The others were muttering, moving around, looking at her. She should say something, but she did not know what. Why were they looking at her?

She did not realize that Daisy was still holding her up until she pulled away. 

Something was wrong. 

Daisy looked worried. 

“What is it?” She asked her.

“May,” she whispered. “He’s gone.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Yes, I realize at this point Ellis would be in like his 4th term as president. But I'm certainly not going to use any names from the real world in this political climate.
> 
> **Don't worry guys! Still one more chapter to go!**


	11. Chapter 11

She was alone again. 

Coulson’s body had been transferred to a vacant recovery room. Monitors with leads attached to his chest displayed his blood pressure and heart rate. All of his vital signs were within normal parameters. But he was not there. 

The EEG showed only minor electroactivity, just the static in his brain that kept his heart beating. 

May sat in a plastic chair outside his room while members of the team filed in to say their final goodbyes. 

Mack did not ask her if they should insert a feeding tube. He knew as well as she did that Coulson would not have wanted any life-sustaining medical intervention in his current state. 

His mind was gone, but his body would starve to death. It could take weeks. 

_“I should have shot him.”_

If he knew what would become of him because of the choices she had made, he never would have forgiven her. If she had not hesitated, if she had not gone searching for answers, if she had not let herself hope that he could come back, he would be gone and she would be at peace with the knowledge that she had kept her promise. 

Instead, she was alone in an empty hallway, half-listening to the whispered farewells of her teammates, feeling her chest cave in on itself. She did not try to push away the pain or ignore it. She focused on it, making herself suffer the misery of every labored heartbeat. 

She deserved this and worse. 

She should have never come back to SHIELD. They were doing fine until she returned and brought all of her baggage with her. She had told herself that she was coming back because she was needed to help save lives. 

The truth was she just missed them. 

She missed Simmons’s brilliant confidence and Fitz’s uninhibited emotional strength. She missed Yo-Yo’s honesty and Mack’s compassion.

And Daisy. 

She missed everything about the woman that she had seen evolve from a disillusioned hacker to a resilient agent. 

Her desire to belong to the team again had cost them dearly. 

When Simmons and Fitz returned, they would be horrified to learn of her actions. She had no doubt that her failure to act sooner had cost her Yo-Yo and Mack’s trust. 

She could not even imagine what Daisy thought of her. 

Disappointment was a far-flung best case scenario now. 

“Melinda?”

“Mike!”

She was so consumed with ruminating despair that she did not even notice the six foot, three inch cyborg standing over her.

“Mack told me I’d find you here,” he said. 

She stood and instinctively reached out to stroke the hair of the little girl asleep in his arms. 

“She’s been out for about an hour,” Mike explained. “The day-long game of hide-and-seek really wore her out.”

“Is that what you told her?” May asked absently.

Mike nodded and handed the child over. Zoe whimpered at the movement before settling into the crook of May’s shoulder. Soft puffs of breath against her neck reassured her that her sleep was undisturbed. 

_“I’m sorry, baobei,”_ she thought, burying her face in the girl’s hair. _“I thought I could bring him home. I’m so sorry.”_

“I heard about Phil,” Mike said. “I’m sorry, Melinda.

“Me too,” she whispered. 

“Hey, Mike.”

The two turned to see Daisy jogging towards them. She greeted Mike with a sideways hug and cast an apologetic half-smile at May.

“Sorry,” she said quietly. “I didn’t see Zoe was asleep.”

“How did you get in here?” She asked Mike. “I thought you were retired.”

“May got Mack’s okay to give me the access codes,” Mike said. “Just in case of emergency.”

“Well, this definitely qualifies,” Daisy said. “What do you think about the place? You ever think of coming back?”

He gave her a rueful smirk. 

“Have to admit, as much as I love Zoe, I didn’t relocate to River’s End just to be May’s ‘backup,’” he told her. “Mack and I have been in touch. I’ve been thinking about getting back in the game.”

That was news to May. 

Under any other circumstances, she might have pressed him for more information, but her heart was not in it. All of her concentration was occupied with maintaining her composure.

“You want to take a look around?” Daisy suggested. “I’d give you the tour myself, but…”

He nodded in understanding. 

“You two talk,” he said. “I’ll show myself around.”

May worked her mouth into a grateful smile.

“Thank you, Mike.”

He leaned over and kissed her temple. 

“Take care,” he told her. 

She closed her eyes, listening to his retreating footsteps. 

“How are you?” Daisy asked. 

May sat down heavily in the chair and pressed her lips to Zoe’s forehead. 

“What am I going to tell her?” She muttered. 

Daisy took a seat in the chair next to her. May waited in the silence that stretched between them for the ax to fall. She knew what would come next: accusations of recklessness, polite but cold requests that they maintain professional distance from one another, maybe even a not-so-veiled suggestion that she would be more comfortable taking a permanent break from SHIELD. Any reaction would have been warranted. She would listen without protest. 

What she did not expect was the warm touch of Daisy’s hand on her shoulder. She flinched in surprise at the contact.

“Tell her the truth,” Daisy said in a choked whisper. “That she has two parents who love her and a mother who would do anything if it meant bringing her father home.”

May stared into her tear-filled eyes and her voice left her. 

“I’m sorry, Daisy,” she mouthed. 

Daisy shook her head. 

“Don’t be,” she said. Tears spilled over and ran down her cheeks, unchecked. “You took a risk, but what other choice did you have? You were right. It was the only way we could have known that he was still here. I’m just sorry that…”

“We couldn’t save him,” May finished. 

“Yeah.”

“Me too.”

Daisy’s face crumpled and she pitched forward in her chair, stifling her sobs with her hand. May grabbed her and pulled her against her shoulder with her free arm. The dam of pressure in her chest burst and she wept quietly into Daisy’s hair while Zoe slept on.

“What are you going to do?” Daisy mumbled.

“What?”

She picked up her head and wiped her face. 

“Tonight?” She asked. “You’re not going home are you? Do you and Zoe want to take my bed? I can sleep on the couch.”

“I shouldn’t… I can’t leave him,” May admitted. “Not yet.”

She nodded.

“I get it,” she said. “What about Zoe?”

May considered the girl in her arms. She would sleep for another eight hours, at least. She could take her into the recovery room, but the risk that she would wake up and see her father in his current condition was not one that she was willing to take. 

“Would you mind taking her for the night?” She asked. “She trusts you. I can be there before she wakes up.”

“Of course!”

May lifted the child and placed her in Daisy’s arms. Zoe wrapped her arms around the young agent’s neck as she got to her feet, but did not wake up. May marveled at the peaceful expression on her daughter’s face. She was so naturally trusting. She prayed that she never gave her cause to lose that unquestioning innocence. 

“Okay,” Daisy said. “I guess we’ll see you in the morning.”

They were halfway down the hall before May caught up with them. Daisy turned back, shooting her a curious look.

Perhaps this was not the best time for this conversation, but Daisy would find out sooner or later. It was better that she heard it from her.

“Daisy, there’s something else you need to know about Zoe,” May started. “We showed her pictures and videos of you and the rest of the team. Phil talked about you all the time. That’s how she knew who you are.” 

She nodded patiently. No doubt, she had pieced that much together already. 

“He told her… _we_ told her that you are her sister,” May confessed. 

Daisy’s lips parted in shock. May took advantage of her stunned silence to explain.

“He wanted her to know that you were part of our family, so she would understand when you returned,” she said. “I wanted to believe that you would be back one day, but I never really had his faith.

We were her only family. I didn’t see the harm in telling her there was someone else who would have loved her or in…in giving her someone to look up to.”

Her ears felt hot. It had seemed like an innocuous white lie at the time. She did not consider that she would be roping Daisy into a familial commitment that she did not ask for. 

“I’ll find a way to explain the truth to her,” she said. “But I didn’t want you to be surprised if she says anything to you about it.”

“N-no, don’t,” Daisy stammered. “I mean, you don’t have to tell her if you don’t want to. One day, maybe. But I don’t mind. I want to…”

She took a deep breath and tried again.

“I’ve never had a sister before.”

May smiled softly.

“I know.”

***

After the steady stream of visitors had stopped, May curled up in a chair in the recovery room beside Coulson’s bed. She knew he was not there anymore, but she could not imagine leaving him alone. Some time during her internal soliloquy of self-depreciating “what-ifs,” the hum of the cardiac monitor must have lulled her to sleep. 

She woke with a crick in her neck.

The medical wing was several floors underground, so there was no daylight to indicate how long she had slept. A quick check of her phone told her that it was almost five in the morning. One more hour and she would need to go to Daisy’s room to pick up Zoe.

Then what?

She had no idea. 

She supposed she would need plan another funeral. 

The idea was so demoralizing that if she could have, she would have closed her eyes and gone back to sleep to avoid thinking of it.

“Goddamnit, Phil.”

For the first time since she stepped in the room, she took a long look at his face. She was afraid that she would see some remnant of that tortured desperation from the memory machine. But his features bore no trace of stress or pain now. He looked peaceful. He might have been sleeping. 

She placed a hand on his forehead and traced his brow with her thumb. 

“I’m sorry,” she told him.

It seemed like all she had done today was apologize, but it needed to be said. There was so much she had cause to regret.

“I know now,” she said. “I know why you had to go. I should have realized it earlier. Sacrificing yourself for the people you love has become your signature move. You’re getting predictable, Phil.”

May knew how ridiculous she sounded, but she did not care. It was just them. She could always be herself when they were together. 

“Daisy knew,” she continued. “She figured out it was Robbie—the Ghost Rider. You don’t have to worry about him anymore. Daisy made sure of that. You would have been so proud of her. Zoe and I are safe now. She’s…”

She coughed and wiped a stray tear with the back of her hand. Her throat throbbed, choked with unshed tears, but she had to keep talking. He had to know.

“Thank you,” she managed to say. “Thank you for our daughter. Thank you for protecting her. She’s so smart, Phil. She’s kind and trusting. I’ll make sure that nothing happens to her. That’s a promise I know that I can keep. I’m just sorry that I couldn’t save you.”

She had to leave. 

She had to get out of there before she lost it altogether. If there was any part of him that could still hear her, he should not know the toll that this had taken on her. After all that he had been through, she could at least let him rest believing that she would be alright. 

Her eyes closed when she kissed him for the last time. 

When she pulled away, she did not say goodbye. She had said it too many times already. 

She was nearly at the door when a voice stopped her dead in her tracks.

“Y-you… you did.”

May’s hand froze just above the door handle. She did not move a muscle. She did not even dare to take a breath. 

_“Don’t do it. Don’t turn around.”_

If she looked, she would see him unconscious and unresponsive in that bed again. He had not spoken. He couldn’t have. 

“You s-saved… me…”

Her body acted of its own volition, turning back to him.

“Phil?” She gasped.

He was awake. 

His brow knitted from the effort of sitting up and making his lips form the right words. The flippant arrogance of imposter who had possessed him was nowhere to be seen. The person who had been left behind struggled to bring his unwieldy body under control. He squinted at her, as if to bring her into focus.

She was paralyzed. 

As much as she might have wished it to happen, no rational thought could have truly prepared her to witness him come back from the dead.

“It’s… it’s m-me, May,” he stammered. 

Hearing him speak her name was enough to jar her out of her fugue. 

She crossed the room in three steps and sat on the bed to face him. It still could have been a trick, but if it was, he was too weak to do her any harm. She reached out slowly and took his hand in hers. 

“I’m s-so sorry,” he said, breathing heavily. “I shouldn’t have—

He was cut off by an explosion of dry coughs. Perhaps it was to be expected. All of the screaming had probably scarred his larynx. 

She watched herself reach for the bottle of water she had left on the nightstand and hold it to his lips, completely detached from her actions. This could not be real. 

“It’s okay,” she said mechanically. “Just take it slow.”

He nodded in gratitude when she took the bottle away. The shaky grip on her hand became perceptibly firmer. 

“Y-you w-were right,” he told her. “I was…t-trapped in here.” 

He brushed his temple with his free hand.

“I could—I could s-see everything, but I couldn’t s-stop him. Just—just like he planned.”

“‘He?’” May repeated. “You mean Talbot?”

Coulson nodded. 

“H-he _really_ knows… how t-to hold a grudge.”

May answered with something between a bark of laughter and a groan. 

It was him.

It really was her Phil.

He was alive. 

But at what cost?

He was resurrected only to become a prisoner in his own mind, forced to watch as the parasite that infected him used his body to kill and maim innocent people. He was helpless to stop the terror and pain that he inflicted on his friends and teammates. If left unchecked, he would still be trapped, watching the organization that he gave his life to sustain fall into ruin.

“He took you,” she said. “He shouldn’t have had the chance. I should have been there. I should have stopped him. I’m sorry.”

Coulson lowered his head with a frown. When he looked at her again, each word was spoken with careful deliberation to ensure that nothing would be misunderstood. 

“I’m the one wh-who’s sorry, May,” he said. “I sh-should have never had you make that promise.

I was s-scared. I was so w-worried about keeping Zoe safe, I d-didn’t think about what it would cost you to m-make sure that I d-didn’t come back. But I saw it. I saw… _everything_ he did. I couldn’t stop him. I tried, but I couldn’t…I never… I didn’t want you to be in pain because of me.”

She swallowed thickly and nodded.

“I know,” she said.

He brought their clasped hands to her cheek, holding her like his life depended on it.

“I love you, Melinda.”

She responded by closing the last inches between them and covering his lips with hers. The taste of him on her tongue was pure oxygen, sustaining her and making her head spin. The chasm that had opened up inside of her when she watched him slip away filled up and overflowed. 

She broke away to wrap her arms around him, feeling drunk on the familiar comfort of his body beneath hers. He pulled her against his chest with all of his strength, holding her so tightly she could feel his heartbeat next to her own. 

“I won’t leave you again, May,” he murmured into her ear. “I promise.”

_One Week Later_

Nick Fury stopped his contemplative pacing to glare at the team assembled on the sofa in the common room.

“For the record, I think this is a bad idea.”

May raised an eyebrow and picked up Zoe to place her in her lap. 

“Mack said that you gave the ‘all clear,’” she retorted.

“What I said was, ‘do what you want, just leave me out of it,’” Fury shot back. “Some of us still work best in the shadows."

May smirked at the agent sitting next to her. Daisy tried to maintain a veneer of professional composure in front of SHIELD’s former director, but the twitch at the corner of her mouth betrayed her. 

Fury was the least of their worries at the moment. 

In spite of her nonchalance, May still had her reservations about this plan. It might well eliminate future collateral damage, but it could also place Coulson in the crosshairs of everyone that had ever had a grudge with him.

His recovery had been a quick one. After all, his body had not suffered atrophy from lack of use. It was a matter of getting it to cooperate without someone else pulling the strings. While it would take some time before he was in fighting shape again, his speech had nearly returned to normal. After a few days, he could move and walk unassisted.

May suspected that his pride in not wanting to appear weak in front of Daisy or Zoe had played a role in getting him back on his feet so quickly. Chasing Zoe through the cavernous halls of the Lighthouse had given him a fair workout over the last few days. 

When he could speak without stammering, he briefed the team on what he was able to piece together of what had happened to him. Most of it, May had already heard or guessed. It was still not easy to listen to. He had suffered a lot in their time apart.

Coulson confirmed that Glenn Talbot was behind his resurrection and intra-cranial incarceration. He hired an Eyghonate to impersonate him and bring SHIELD to its knees. Apparently, she learned, “Eyghonates” are a particularly gruesome parasitic alien race with no corporeal form, capable of possessing deceased hosts. Coulson explained that the alien parasite did not understand the extent of Talbot’s plan. He did not realize that watching himself personally dismantle the sum total of his life’s work and destroy the people that he loved would be the worst torture Talbot could have devised. 

The parasite had fled Coulson’s body when it was in the memory machine. But Talbot was still out there. Coulson had no illusions that he would stop until he was satisfied. 

When he told her his proposed solution, May almost dragged him down to medical to make sure he had no residual brain damage.

“I know what this looks like,” he said. “But this isn’t me being ‘predictably self-sacrificing.’ I can handle whatever he throws at me. And if I can’t, I know that you, Daisy, and the rest of the team can. This needs to happen. No one else should die because of Talbot’s personal vendetta against me.”

“Well, _Zephyr One_ did make contact yesterday,” she admitted, grudgingly. “It wouldn’t hurt to have a spaceship on our side if he makes another move.”

“And we’ll have Fitz and Simmons back,” Coulson added.

May allowed herself a small smile at the thought. 

They were coming home.

After six long years, they would all be a team again.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he promised. “Whatever comes next, we’ll handle it together.”

As always, it was his conviction and faith in their team that persuaded her. 

Which is why, one week after Coulson officially came back from the dead, the veteran agents of SHIELD gathered in the common area to watch their director give a televised address providing an account of the recent attacks.

“He’s on,” Yo-Yo said. “Turn it up, Daisy!”

“… MacKenzie, Director of the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division.”

The deputy commissioner stepped down from the podium.

Every member of the team held their breaths as Mack took the stand. 

“Thank you, Commissioner Wilkes,” he began. “As all of you know, SHIELD has suffered a number of significant setbacks in recent years. The infiltration of Hydra and the assassination attempt carried out by a Life Model Decoy posing as one of our agents has shaken the public’s faith in our division. Lack of transparency has been SHIELD’s Achille’s heel.” 

“I’m trying not to take this personally,” Fury said. “Who’s idea was this again?”

“Mack’s his own man, sir,” Yo-Yo defended. 

May and Daisy exchanged a covert glance. 

The body of the speech was Mack’s, but they knew that Coulson had had one or two editorial suggestions.

“…intelligence organizations must conduct their operations in secret by design,” Mack continued. “But it is my belief that their goals should be public knowledge. And secrecy should not come at the cost of human life. 

Last week, three attacks were carried out in heavily populated areas. The man behind these terrorist events has been identified by the media as SHIELD Agent Phillip J. Coulson. This has led to confusion, speculation, and multiple conspiracy theories, as the records made available to the public by former Agent Natasha Romanoff state that Phil Coulson perished before the Battle of New York.

I am here today to set the record straight. Coulson was a high ranking, dedicated agent who did indeed give his life in service of SHIELD before that famous battle. However, he was revived shortly thereafter—"

“‘Shortly?’” Daisy interjected.

Yo-Yo scoffed. 

“So much for transparency.”

“Do I have to remind you all that we work for a covert intelligence agency?” Fury demanded. “The world isn’t ready to learn everything we do. We keep some secrets for a reason.”

May had seen him like this before. He would go on all day if they let him. Luckily, Zoe distracted him by reaching over her head and holding her arms out to him.

Some of the bluster went out of him at the sight of the girl trying to get his attention. He even managed some version of a smile at her.

“Flerken!” Zoe exclaimed, pointing at his eye-patch. 

Fury’s smile vanished. 

“You don’t need to worry about Coulson, May,” he decided. “I’m going to kill him myself.”

May pulled Zoe back down into her lap so she could hide her silent laughter from her former boss. 

“… made SHIELD the organization that it is today,” Mack said from the screen. “Due to his persistence in fulfilling SHIELD’s mandate of protection, Phil Coulson has made no shortage of enemies. One of these individuals sought to destroy his legacy by enlisting a double to carry out these attacks. It was this man’s intent to sully the name of a good man. In the process, several people were hurt. Some were even killed.

SHIELD’s job is to protect the public against threats that exceed the purview of traditional intelligence agencies. There are forces and individuals who do not want to see us succeed. When we do, they seek to rectify their failings with vengeance. They come after our organization, our agents. They want to discredit us, to make everyone believe we do not have their best interests at heart. Innocent people become collateral damage. 

This is unacceptable.

As Director of SHIELD, it is part of my job to see that civilians are not caught in the crossfire of a vendetta carried out by individuals that harbor a grudge against us for protecting the public. As a former director himself, Phil Coulson agrees with me that this cycle of destruction should not be allowed to continue. 

That is why, after working in anonymity for the past decade, he has decided to address you today in person.”

May’s heart raced as Mack stepped down from the podium and Coulson’s face filled the screen. 

“Daddy!” Zoe shrieked. 

She tightened her grip on the squirming child, as much to calm herself as to keep Zoe still. 

“I can’t believe he’s really doing this,” Daisy muttered.

“It’s been a long time coming,” May replied. 

“Good evening,” Coulson greeted the reporters. “I’ve spent a lot of time working to help rebuild our agency after Hydra’s infiltration. I did this because I believed—I still believe in SHIELD’s mission.

As Director MacKenzie stated, sometimes, it is necessary that SHIELD works in the shadows. But in this case, it was the covert nature of my work that cost lives—

“He wasn’t undercover!” Daisy protested. “He was dead!”

“Yeah,” Fury scoffed. “Try explaining _that_ to the public.”

“…and to draw me out,” Coulson said. “Well, it worked. Here I am. I’m not hiding anymore. If you want to take me down, you are welcome to try.”

May swallowed and held his gaze through the screen. His message was meant for Talbot, but, even through the camera, his eyes were fixed on her.

“But I won’t make it easy for you,” he concluded. “And I won’t be alone.”

She smiled grimly as he walked off the stage without another word. 

The current circumstances marred the recognition of his life’s work. When she pictured him going public, it had been to call attention to his accomplishments rather than to protect civilians by painting a target on his back. 

But it was fitting. 

It was him.

The events from the past year had taught her that she could not stop him from being himself. If that meant he would not shut her out or leave her behind, she could live with it. 

“So, May?” Daisy asked. “What happens now?”

She considered the young agent who refused to give up on her, who forgave her for her secrets and recklessness. She wished she could tell her with certainty that it was going to be alright, but she was done making promises she could not keep. 

“We do what we always do,” she told her. “We do our jobs. We watch each other’s backs.”

Daisy’s answering smile was strained. 

“That easy, huh?”

“Of course not,” May said. “It’s never easy. But we’ll do it anyway. Together.”

“Together,” Daisy echoed. 

May shifted Zoe to her left side and stood up. She reached down and pulled Daisy to her feet by the hand.

“Come on,” she said. “Back to work.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who followed me with this! It was a lot of fun to write and I hope you all enjoyed it!


End file.
